A TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

'One of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time' Guardian

Shane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career; in addition to introducing his readers to 'the thin king / who eats the world,' McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. 'O reader, listener, stay,' McCrae writes. 'You are now evidence.'

In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those that populate the poet's world. Helen weighs Paris's spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas's ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises - the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in the Guardian, 'In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.'

Praise for Shane McCrae

'Out of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation'


GARTH GREENWELL

'Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'

RABIH ALAMEDDINE

'McCrae's poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history . . . His poetry moves freely within the restricted syllabic lines, constructing a wild, vivid dreamworld of a lush green garden, where an angry robot bird leads us down an Edenic rabbit hole . . . It confrms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time, throwing punches at the English language and its hierarchical traditions'

KIT FAN, Guardian

'A shrewd composer of American stories'

DAN CHIASSON, The New Yorker

'Shane McCrae has many gifts as a poet, but among his most hypnotizing is his ability to create poems that simultaneously blare and beacon . . . McCrae has been creating ambitious work that demands - earns - our attention. I often feel out of time when I am reading his words; they arrive with a Miltonic fury, and yet they are so contemporary and critical for our present, strange world'

NICK RIPATRAZONE, The Millions