Skip to content

Buy any book to win a FREE MEMBERSHIP - offer ends MIDNIGHT 4th Oct

The Many Hundreds of the Scent by Shane McCrae

Regular price £12.99

Unit price per 

only -1 left in stock

Please note: Individual book orders to Europe are shipped DDU (Delivery Duties Unpaid) and customers in the EU may have to pay local import VAT and customs duties in the receiving country. This doesn't apply to quarterly member mailings.

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.'

Corsair

MEMBERS ENJOY 25% OFF ALL POETRY BOOKS

JOIN NOW

Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books

Close (esc)

Popup

Use this popup to embed a mailing list sign up form. Alternatively use it as a simple call to action with a link to a product or a page.

Age verification

By clicking enter you are verifying that you are old enough to consume alcohol.

Search

Your cart is currently empty.
Shop now