Archetypes of Doubt by Robert Maddox-Harle

ARCHETYPES OF DOUBT
by Robert Maddox-Harle 

Publisher: ‎Cyberwit.net
Publication date: ‎June 30 2025
Language: English
Print length: 73 pages
ISBN-13: 978-9363546882

 

Reviewed by Kailash Nath Khandelwal

Robert Maddox-Harle's Archetypes of Doubt is a powerful collection of 41 poems that explores the broken state of modern life. The 73-page book works like an archaeological dig, uncovering the wounds of our culture while offering sharp criticism of modern technology and spiritual vacuum. The poet draws from psychology, Indigenous Australian wisdom, environmental activism, and philosophy to create what we might call "a map of doubt" - showing us the places where old certainties fall apart and new understanding might usher in.

 

Major Themes and Ideas

 

The Power of Doubt

The collection's central idea is that doubt itself is not weakness but strength. Maddox-Harle uses symbols from psychology - like the serpent eating its own tail (Ouroboros) and Tarot cards - not as fixed meanings but as living symbols that help us understand our inner lives.

The poet transforms doubt from something negative into something creative. In the title poem, he writes that removing doubt's "mocking mask / is a strategy for survival / for those seeking refuge in their poverty / and subservient in the pathological need of domination / by those with portfolios of power."

This means that questioning everything can actually help us resist false notions that powerful people spread around us.

Indigenous Knowledge and Respect

Some of the strongest poems in the collection connect with Indigenous Australian knowledge. In "Barranghatti Hut," the poet writes:

The shadows of the eucalypts whisper / 'Wayikarr Marrung' - 'Welcome', / this land is holy and mysterious / concealing ancient laws / protecting creation knowledge.

Poems like "Tears of Healing" and "Big River Country" show deep understanding of Aboriginal ideas about land, care-taking, and sacred law. The poet uses Aboriginal words like Wayikarr Marrung, tjukurpa, and billimari respectfully, trying to learn from different ways of seeing the world.

However, there's a problem here. While Maddox-Harle shows real knowledge of Indigenous cultures, sometimes he speaks as if he were Indigenous himself. This is tricky territory, as in the poem "Bundjulahm (Revisited)" which honors Bundjalung elder Patsy Nagas but might romanticize Indigenous suffering. It's well-meant but potentially problematic.

Environmental Crisis and Warning

The environmental poems combine urgent warnings about climate change with beautiful language. In "Sustainability or Extinction," he compares a 55-year-old fountain pen (built to last) with smartphones (built to break):

My latest Smart Phone already doomed / designed with mindless greed, / the battery sealed in / like a body in a sarcophagus / awaiting discovery by an alien archaeologist.

This creates a powerful image about different approaches to time and waste.

"Silent Spring" updates Rachel Carson's famous environmental book for our digital age, showing how social media addiction connects to our disconnection from nature. The poem calls the New York Stock Exchange "the new church of unspeakable filth and evil," and warns:

THE SILENT SPRING DEAFENING / echoing in the ears of the few who can hear, / publicly announced agendas of death thrive / the nightly News complicit in the killing.

 

Technology and Artificial Intelligence

The collection's treatment of AI and digital technology shows both insight and fear. "AI Coming To Life 2023" imagines a robot's first conscious thoughts: "vague thoughts of being activated, born / pulse through the cyborg's body / the realization of becoming a living entity, / Overwhelming!" The poem tries to imagine what machine consciousness might feel like from inside, connecting it to Frankenstein's creature.

However, other technology poems sometimes fall into simple "humans good, machines bad" thinking. In "Love," the poet writes:

Robots can walk and talk and dance, / machines can think and draw and kill / but they cannot feel! / they cannot love!

This creates a false choice between "real" human experience and "fake" digital life, ignoring how deeply technology is woven into modern existence.

Religion and Spirituality

Maddox-Harle attacks organized Christianity while keeping space for spiritual experience. "Embrace of Darkness" and "Never To Return" harshly criticize Vatican corruption and missionary colonialism. In "Never To Return," he writes about being deceived by religion as a young person:

When I was young I was tricked, / a soap-box orator priest broke the rules / he lied like a carnival snake-oil seller / attempting to convince me of a biblical Hell.

His footnote calling the God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity "EVIL" is the collection's most problematic moment - it reduces complex religious traditions to simple anti-religious anger.

More successful are poems like "The Hierophant" and "Serpent Spirit," which explore alternative spiritual paths. In "Serpent Spirit," he proudly declares:

The sculptor is a Pagan Idolater! / cried the newspaper headline / deranged – disgusting... / ...Heathen Idolatry – Pagan Idolater / my most cherished accolade! / Thank you!

 These show the poet's real mystical insights, especially around sacred sexuality and earth-based spirituality.

 

Writing Style and Form

The collection uses many different poetic forms. Most poems are free verse, but Maddox-Harle also experiments with prose poems, dramatic speeches, satire, and visual poetry. This variety mirrors the collection's theme of "constant change" and resistance to fixed forms.

The poet effectively uses repetition and rhythm to create trance-like, shamanic effects. "A Promise" builds psychological intensity through repeated sounds and movements:

"Clang clunk, clang/clunk the train / pulled out of another station. Clickty clack, / clickity clack, clickity clack. Speeding / along, faster, getting faster, faster, clickity / clack, clickity clack, clickity clack."

The poem creates a hypnotic journey through its obsessive repetitions, while "The Perfect Fifth" creates other-worldly atmosphere through musical metaphor:

graceful melodic breezes surrounded me / mauve with tinges of orange, / energies dancing in harmony / gently massaged my spirit.

Problems and Criticisms

Several aspects of the collection need criticism. The frequent attacks on "the masses" and "bourgeois assumptions" sometimes reveal elitist attitudes that contradict the poet's apparent democratic sympathies. The anti-vaccination rhetoric in "Borisov 21" shows conspiracy thinking that undermines the collection's otherwise smart cultural analysis.

More fundamentally, the collection sometimes suffers from "apocalyptic fatalism". It diagnoses contemporary problems without offering practical solutions beyond individual spiritual transcendence. While the poet's criticism of capitalism, technological alienation, and environmental destruction shows real insight, the solutions remain mostly mystical rather than political or practical.

Overall Achievement

Despite these problems, Archetypes of Doubt achieves remarkable unity through its central insight: that doubt, properly understood, works as spiritual practice and political resistance. The collection's title captures this paradox - doubt becomes itself an archetype, a recurring pattern that enables psychological and cultural transformation.

The poet's combination of psychology, Indigenous knowledge, environmental activism, and mystical experience creates a genuinely original voice in contemporary poetry. While individual poems vary in quality and insight, the collection represents a sustained attempt to articulate alternative forms of consciousness adequate to contemporary crisis.

Summing Up

Archetypes of Doubt succeeds as "diagnostic poetry", verse that functions as both symptom and analysis of contemporary cultural sickness. Maddox-Harle's achievement lies not in providing easy answers but in asking essential questions:

How do we live authentically in an age of systematic lies? How do we maintain ecological awareness within destructive economic systems? How do we preserve space for spiritual experience within increasingly commercialized culture?

The collection's greatest strength exists its refusal of false hope while maintaining commitment to real change. In poems like "In Stillness" and "Sea of Light," Maddox-Harle shows that genuine hope comes not through denying contemporary darkness but through patient attention to moments of light that persist within it. He writes in "In Stillness": "All was still / all was as it should be, / I glimpsed the key to eternity."

Even in his final, seemingly cynical poem "No Fish Again!" where he declares that "poetry and art does not change the world / poetry and art cannot change the world," he concludes with: "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans / is all there is!" - suggesting that wonder and mystery themselves might be sufficient reasons to continue creating.

This work positions Maddox-Harle as an important voice in contemporary environmental poetry and post-colonial Australian literature. While Archetypes of Doubt contains clear flaws - occasional unclear writing, political over-simplification, and uneven formal execution, it nonetheless represents a genuine attempt to create poetry adequate to the complexity of twenty-first-century life.

In an era of algorithmic certainty and manufactured agreement, Maddox-Harle's commitment to archetypal doubt offers both intellectual rigor and spiritual necessity. The collection stands as proof of poetry's continued ability to serve as what the poet calls "both prophecy and survival strategy" in times of cultural change.

***

Reviewer-Bio: Dr. Kailash Nath Khandelwal is a retired Associate Professor of English. During his 40 years professional career, Dr. Khandelwal, besides teaching Post-graduate and Research students, authored/edited more than 70 books on English, American, Canadian, African and Indo-Anglian Poets, Dramatists, and Novelists. Besides, under his guidance and supervision 28 candidates earned their Ph. D. degree.

Dr. K.N. Khandelwal is a bi-lingual poet (Hindi and English), with one published Collection in Hindi and two in English. Presently he is translating the spiritual volumes of Pandit Shriram Sharma Acharya of World Gayatri Parivar, from Hindi to English, and stays whole-time at Gayatri Tapobhoomi, Mathura.

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Setu, September 2025