Reviews

'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”. 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 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’ 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 (“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.'

- Owen Vince in Hark Magazine

'Robert Herbert McClean is interested in treating language as a material he recasts, although he is more interested in assault than parody or formal effects . . . He collages different kinds of vocabulary ingeniously . . . Pangs! is angry, funny, and well produced . . . McClean’s poems markedly move away from the fixed historical and geographical markers which characterise more obviously political poets and fiction writers . . . Pangs! is an encouraging, attention-grabbing debut.' - John McAuliffe in the Irish Times

'This collection is a further example of the innovative production of Test Centre Press and the potential writers, such as Robert Herbert McClean, have to re-establish the relationship between form and content in contemporary poetry, creating works which are not only read but experienced. The binding of the collection resembles the form of a flip-up notebook, and this, combined with its landscape text, immediately alters our reading experience. The production of the book begins to bring its material and textual components into closer alignment, and provides a sense of the process which feeds into the poetry. The sharpness and spontaneity characteristic of the text, complete with rough edges of syntax or cancellations where words and phrases are scratched out, are features we may expect to discover in a writer’s personal journal; a peek at their work in progress. The way in which the poems are presented, both in their book form and in how they function on the page, can arguably be seen to reduce the distance between the way in which a writer begins to generate ideas and drafts, and the polished product which the public generally receives.

Crossings out are employed frequently, but lend the poems an intriguing dualism; their placement has not been carried out at random nor as a superfluous gesture against tradition, but instead often allow two versions of the poem to appear on the page simultaneously. Through this the reader is given insight into the creative process of re-shaping and revision but also a further glimpse into the dynamics of our everyday communication; the tensions between what is said or remains unsaid, and what is sustained by being recorded, or is otherwise allowed to fade. They embody the uncertainty and frequent self-editing which we are pushed towards with a great honesty and openness. This relates not only to creative production, but also to the ways in which we establish an identity in the world we live in, and this theme remains at the heart of the collection.
The poems vary in length but share continuous lines closer to a prose structure, which leave room not only for the original thought behind a particular poem but also for asides and interjections. Enjambment and traditional poetic forms are sacrificed, but the fluidity and lyricism of language use and potential shifts in voice and perspective allow the poet a full range of possibility. Through these sequences we see snap-shots of human tenderness and vulnerability, determined to surface from behind a gauze of social-media habits and technological advancements.

McClean’s narrator, or one of his narrators, states:‘I want to smash my mobile phone as is always the way in whatever season- with feigned embarrassment and in such trying times- and in such trying times.’ They frequently pose the question of what we leave behind as we take ever bigger strides. The language employed also destabilises our sense of a coherent narrative, capturing something of the fragmented project of this identity making, and how our thought patterns move from one thing to the next. The poet maintains an immense energy and virtuosity in moving between voices, ideas and images, and this strength and distinctiveness means the poems don’t always lend themselves to being easily scanned or interpreted, but this makes them even more worthy of pursuing. One minor criticism would be that the experiment in form could be pushed further, or vary more frequently as the collection goes on. However, they offer a fresh challenge, and I hope this experiment continues in further collections of the same strength and ambition.' - Daniel Williams in Cadaverine Magazine

'The poems in Pangs! chart a self-ironising, quasi-subconscious journey of the lyric ‘I’ to find love, hung in the limbo between lived (‘IRL’) and online existence, and taunted by internalised ghosts of modernities and masculinities past. As for the identity of this ‘I’, we are warned at the book’s outset: “The facilitator is high on life. I – is not real.”

With this construct set firmly in place, Pangs! proceeds fitfully and furiously through a high-octane concatenation of outbursts. Vying for airspace in the transmission of the ‘I’, McClean conducts a polyvocality of difficult characters that form literary and psychological tropes: conflicted echoes of the onanistic modernist hero; the religious zealot; the neurotic man-child; the abusive authoritarian; and the hopeless romantic. Confined in the space of individual poems, these voices undergo rapid-fire shifts in tone and register that make the poems often difficult to read ‘coherently’, let alone write about. In fact, it might be better to abandon the idea of ‘reading’ altogether and instead approach the poems as a kind of frequency to tune into. Like John Berryman’s meandering – sometimes ranting – but poignant and succinct Dream Songs, the poems’ voices seem to be locked into their own internal power struggles, disputes and hierarchies. To quote this effect is to risk further fragmenting an already fragmented style:

Well educated. Ultimately unemployable. I consciously liked disliking him with some
success– composed a shopping list treatise on the I love you subject– in a gnostic fume. (‘1.21’)

Divided into three sections each with twenty-three numbered parts, the poems also recall Berryman in the sense that their formal structure imposes parameters on what is more anarchic in the content. And like anarchy, their ‘point’ is often convoluted or obscured by their energies; they accumulate then dissipate, making the effect of reading like moving round a room and eavesdropping on a series of conversations. Yet the recurrences of digital ephemera – buzz-markers of homogenised experience (cf. McDonalds/Netflix/CCTV); feminised “dribs and drabs” of the poems’ beloved “you”; indices of high cultural intake; and the hangover of religious musings – root them in a thoroughly contemporary narrative. Like the conflicted inner voices of an individual psyche, the poems’ ‘I’s often undermine and abuse each other, sometimes surfacing like the cynical superego to self-reflexively taunt its own poetic ‘essence’:

Your arbitrary sentence structure is beguiling at best. You’re a linguistic floozy. You’re like a car bomb. I mean everything. ('1.6')

This neurotic self-consciousness permeates the poems, claiming elsewhere: “I’m textually debunked” and “This is where alt poets go to die”. The stacked effect of this aggrandising speaks the same truth as any exaggerated defence mechanism: significant vulnerability. Which is why, coming from the same interiority, the poems’ ‘I’ also says very beautiful, lyrical and ‘truthful’ things. In the midst of altercation, there is a sense that at some obfuscated level, ‘truth’ is trying to be spoken. Or rather, the subjective ‘truth’ of an individual body or psyche – which is of course itself already multiple and fragmented – is being searched for through reiteration in language. Such divergence is formally heightened by McClean’s technique of what might be called ‘erasure’, in which words and sentences are intermittently struck through to visibly retain their working. The best of these create subtle, humorous and often tender triangulations that read like asides whispered from the corner of the poem’s mouth:

Go and study it where everything is– in the wild play

of god– and not on my laptop. (‘1.1’)

But perhaps ‘erasure’ is too soft and prosaic a term. ‘Erasure’ evokes, surely, the movements of the tide – the gentle smoothing-out of lines drawn in the sand. The gesture Pangs! enacts on its texts is much more violent, and is testament to the intensity of its inner frustrations.' - Daisy Lafarge in Poetry Review