“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

Pangs! by Robert Herbert McClean
Published by Test Centre, 2015
A Review – by O.V.
I remember sitting in the boiling-away sunlight of a German city, on a balcony, talking
about poetry with somebody better and more experienced than me. They said something
along the lines of, “all poetry comes back to first love” (Ed. Above, yeah?) . I think I smiled
and looked away as a furious dog chased a ball or something indistinct across the grass
below.
But maybe poetry doesn’t come back. Maybe it expands, like “creation” or the big bang
and is, basically, in effect, an accumulation. When Shelley walked around the ruined,
mildewed and probably stinking baths of Caracalla, he wrote a raw sonnet that was all
about placement, emphasis. You’re in Shelley’s trip, strapped in, seeing the baths through
his eyes. But what if you deny the principle of emphasis and precision? What if you
abandon that illusion of control?
“Pangs!” is all about that accumulation, that evaporating fuzziness. It is both pleasingly
precise in its imagery, as well as daringly obtuse in its languages and sources and textures.
This is the Katamari Damacy of poetry; a planet massing, drawing gas and light and fire
and everything in toward its boiling heart and then exploding against the edge of a table.
Urbanscapes; shopping trips (I think Aldi, I’m not sure); sex; porn; dancing; microwaves;
lust; sneezing; CCTV; TV shows; god. This is modern life, and everything inside of it,
everything that adheres to it or falls away. Despite how personal and fearless and
shameless these images are (“I looked at myself poorly wrestle my flaccid member”),
they’re also anchors for memory, for us. We see ourselves somewhere in their honesty;
drugs, alcohol, falling in love, staring blankly into the sky, our head screaming. All of this
is accompanied by traditional, sclerotic poetic motifs plunging into this new, malodorous
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