spent the 1980s putting Scottish poetry in a European context. He then left Scotland for a job as a linguist in Geneva where, among other things, he ran the language service of the World Health Organization for 15 years. The struggle to manipulate or in part survive variously defective systems informs his work. McCarey is a founding member of Poésies en Mouvement (Geneva), panjandrum of Molecular Press and partner in various audio and mechanical installations on tour in Europe and the Americas. His early collected poetry, Collected Contraptions, was published by Carcanet in 2011. The rest is to be found on www.thesyllabary.com. His books include Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russians (Scottish Academic Press, 1987), Find an Angel and Pick a Fight (Molecular Press, 2013) and De l’Oubli (L’Ours Blanc, in press). In 2016 he convened and chaired a meeting of experts on a fake pandemic. The proceedings were published under the title Petrushka in 2017; a Russian translation is imminent.