“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

(“1.1″, “1.2”, “1.3”, etc.,) suggest the formation of a “record”, a form of self-curation that
may either be terrifying or desirable. Is this the poet-self massing together the ephemera of
their thoughts, loves, lives for public consumption, or is it a third-party’s assiduous and
coherent record of that self, the passive net of surveillance which captures everything, and
brings it together? It’s why you can’t escape this idea of expansion and contraction. The
poems pulse in their language, but also through their form and the possibilities that this
form raises. Test Centre’s handsome and pleasing and readable booklet only adds to this
sense of flippability, parsing, of archive cards sorted together, referring to a universe of
wunderkammer “stuff” existing beyond it; in a basement, behind glass cabinets, on
bedroom floors, miles in the air. In dismissing the poetic, McClean also highlights those
conditions which we believe it represents. It’s as if he has stripped out and wrecked-up the
Mansion of the House of the Poets, only to throw all of its heavy velvet curtains, stuffed
animal’s heads, dining services, bed spreads, antique linen, swords and cables and love
letters back inside. A jumble that is also a totality. A different kind of coherence.
Pangs! is effusive, bubbling, witty, mocking, sad. It is perhaps the modern equivalent of a
lurid Mass Observation experiment. It’s a pornography about Soviet ideology meetings in
which lapsed workers had to admit their ideological faux pas to their comrades. It is an oil
portrait of the squirrel my friend once saw drinking gravy from a polystyrene box. Pangs!
accumulates and reinvents itself. Naughty and nice. Violent. Scary. Darkly relatable.
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