Look back a generation, I look back Ten generations on my mother’s sideFurther, to England and to Ireland Knowing ten words they knew, a thousand wordsKnowing the language they, my ancestors Knew on my mother’s side, in IrelandIn England. I look back two genera- tions on my father’s side, his mother andHis father, and I’m sure I know them, most Of the words they knew. I can’t look back and knowTheir fathers or their mothers. I can guess Six generations back, or seven, tooMany far back past seven, back at eight or Further, I might not, if I stood before themAny who lived in Africa, I might Not know a single word. What could I sayWhat object could I, if I stood before Them, any ancestor, what object couldI gesture to, to start to learn the language Wherever I have met them, if I stoodBefore them, any one, if there were trees There, I could touch a tree, say Tree, then pointTo them, then back to the tree, or thump my chest And say my name, or say You are my auntOr say You are my father many fathers Before him. What are we? What is your wordFor you? What do you know about the ocean If he lived inland. If he lived besideThe ocean, if whatever carried me Through time to him could keep us there foreverI could stand listening forever, between Him and the ocean. I could stand forever
Race in Language
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- April 23, 2024
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Excerpted from THE MANY HUNDREDS OF THE SCENT: Poems by Shane McCrae. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Shane McCrae. All rights reserved.
Shane McCrae’s most recent books of poetry are Cain Named the Animal, a finalist for the Forward Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award, and The Many Hundreds of the Scent. His memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was published in 2023. Also in 2023, he was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his other awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer’s Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
New York, New York
Macmillan
A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers' Award.
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 who 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 English 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.”
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