“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

pool, as “a moon affected by the tides” (“3.8″), howled at by a “mutant Alsatian” which
had appeared earlier, before disappearing. Another component of this “whole life” seen
passing by from a bus window. Each compressed prose poem rarely occupies ever more
than a half of its page. But no rules seem to govern those poems that are long, and those
short; only entropy, or energy, or fear?
Brashly, excitedly, the collection reproduces the – or, at least, “a“, for this is still a singular
voice – modern experience of notation, assertion, posturing, record, mask. McClean
knowingly makes absurd and embarrassing claims, giving all of himself, before smiling
sideways; is this a joke, a pretend of pretend? In “2.2” we’re told, “I probably got this voice
from a movie I saw”. Not only the Americanised language, but the sort of coy, half-ironic
admission which both exposes the poet to ridicule but also hints that this is in fact a boast.
At what point must we be embarrassed, at what point proud? At what point should we be
afraid? The poet-self addresses the narcissistic impulse to preserve and observe;
“Everyone online is an artist these days“, before somehow leaping out of their own body,
beyond the surface of the screen, to observe as “one gregariously laughs at me writing on
their profile“. The poet is aware and “inundated” with their own performance, urging
those who he imagines are his loves; “if my love stretches your dimples – choose it. You’ve
the most beautiful eyes” (“3.13″). This is a poet conscious of how they are disemboweling
the received legacies of the lyric voice, of the “Poet”, as “the lewd spoof of a skewed idyll”
(“3.12″). We’re left prodding for clues, among the rubble, the jokes. You think about Hugh
Cassons’s 1945 call for the war-bombed churches of London to become war memorials, as
if through fragmentation and collapse we can find a new space for consolation and
rebuilding, a preservation of their “beauty of strangeness“.
Technically, McClean is deft and waxy in the way in which he utilises the form of the book
and its setting. Crossed-out sentences both deface and yet highlight what has been
removed; after all, we can still read the sentence behind the line. Everything is permanent
now. The “online” cannot be erased; it is forever. Similarly, the use of numbered segments
35