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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

Among the many pleasures of listening to Robert Lowell read, hearing him pronounce ‘My mind’s not right’ in the southern drawl he caught early, and somehow retained, has to rank near the top That voice, its specific inflection, echoes through Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost, in my head at least, and not only when she nods explicitly towards him, as in her most outright allusion to ‘Skunk Hour’: ‘my mind has been wrong/for a long long time’ (‘Haruspex’) Writing on Lowell, Ian Hamilton noted that, in Life Studies, ‘His inheritance has dwindled to the involuntary habit of expecting from the world what he knows it cannot afford, or searching for heaven when he knows full well that he is confined to hell’     Benson appears to be in a similar bind, although for much of the book, especially its second section, she is talking not so much from hell as from a void – ‘Perhaps this is only/purgatory, sister,/and beyond it, bliss’ (‘Toad’) Above all, this is a book about power and its misuses, the possible response to being prey, or vehicle and that unlikely, hopeful, ‘perhaps’ It’s a book that crackles with manic energy, with institutional power and the absence of free will; a hyperrealist screenplay, superheroic in its visual energies In the first part of the book, Benson’s achievement is to subtly prepare the ground for personal poems which are no less full of injustice, horror or dread than the Wagnerian, mythical opening half She has, by their arrival, tuned our ear to the ledge of terror on which the speakers perch, ensuring that the seemingly domestic, village settings of the second half are, throughout, sites of fear and danger The speaker feels imperilled at home and in the surrounding land, edgy and alert     In ‘Zeus’ the god of gods is first met on a prison visit and his impact is, from the off, physically disastrous to those he encounters: ‘days I talked with Zeus/I ate only ice/felt the blood trouble and burn/under my skin’; we are transported from Olympus to a scene of ‘bullet-proof glass/and a speaker-phone between us’ 

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Art

Issue No. 2

From Back Home

J. H. Engstrom

Art

Issue No. 2

In his collection From Back Home the Swedish photographer JH Engström traced his childhood memories back to the province...

poetry

February 2014

Two Poems from A Finger in the Fishes Mouth

Derek Jarman

poetry

February 2014

To mark the 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, Test Centre has produced a facsimile edition of his sole,...

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Issue No. 9

Leaving Theories Behind

Enrique Vila-Matas

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Issue No. 9

I. I went to Lyon because an organisation called Villa Fondebrider invited me to give a talk on the relationship...

 

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