In the next edition of KROnline, Lindsay Turner reviews Shane McCrae’s Mule. You’ll be grateful for her commentary that, like liner notes or an opera libretto, elucidates this text; reading McCrae’s book can feel like silently following a musical score, trying to mentally play the instrumentation and understand the words all at once. Turner walks you through the sonnet structure and other formal devices that undergird McCrae’s work.
Turner describes how McCrae scores his poems with lines you would expect to see in prose to represent line breaks in poems, as in: “McCrae scores / his poems.” The line breaks within the lineated poem double its meaning. Turner points out that this “doubly broken verse” fractures but ultimately enriches each line.
McCrae also doubles the meaning by repeating phrases with a few lines or varying the phrase a little. The effect is that of a folk dance where the dancer steps forward, then back, then to the left, box-stepping around meaning. For example, “In the Garden of the Ghosts of the Garden” continues to repeat the phrase in the title through the first few lines:
And we divorced in water in a gar-
den in the pond in the garden in the pond
Up to our ankles in the mud and neck-
deep in the water and we stood in the water
These almost-anaphoras, almost-choruses establish the room of meaning where McCrae dances and sings with you.
Since Mule appeared, McCrae has also published Canaan with independent Rescue Press. This compact book articulates a mournful ballad of a slave, rich with history but contemporary in vision. Some of the same formal constraints – internally broken lines, meter – carry forward from Mule, allowing the vivid, lyrical voice established in the first book to sing in a new range through this text. You might want to pick up these two pieces together, each a necessary supplement to the other.
Read two McCrae poems featured in Mule, first published on KROnline here.
Check out a recent interview with McCrae here.