The Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems

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.”