Poetry Book of the Month: The Gilded Auction Block by Shane McCrae

Almost half of Shane McCrae’s The Gilded Auction Block is set in Hell, where the poet is led around by a swearing robot bird. This seems like something worth mentioning. The fact that one newspaper recently reviewed the book without mentioning it at all also seems worth mentioning, for two reasons.

First, because it’s a testament to the sheer amount of other stuff going on this remarkable collection. Second, because it’s part of a wider trend in the reception of poetry – celebrating the anecdotal and autobiographical, highlighting poems which can be presented as an account of the poet’s life, and shying away from those which can’t. It’s something I’ve been guilty of myself, but in the case of work as rich and ambitious as McCrae’s it seems like a disservice.

Yes, his poetry draws on his own fascinating story (of which more later), but also on a host of others, not least forgotten voices from the past. Like fellow American Tracy K Smith, he edits archival documents into poems; in one, the words of a former slave, Ann Parker, are shaped into iambic lines. Elsewhere, he addresses or ventriloquises America itself, its politicians (Joe Arpaio, Jeff Sessions, Maxine Waters), the literary canon (sometimes oddly – in a poem responding to Sylvia Plath’s use of the N-word, he quotes the medieval Scot William Dunbar), and creatures that exist only in his imagination (such as the Frankenstinian “Monster Made of America”).

The strength of this book comes from the way McCrae unites this crowd to reveal the common shadows cast over all of them – racism and authoritarianism, a broken country, broken family ties. His state-of-the-nation poems’ starting-points are sometimes obvious, but their destinations are always a surprise. “America I was driving when I heard you/ Had died,” one poem begins, bluntly – but by its closing lines the poet is dreaming of himself as an “African Queen”, an image carried from the Ann Parker poem on the previous page, as if her mind were flowing into his.

The opening poem, “The President Visits the Storm”, draws on a self-congratulatory speech Trump gave to survivors of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. A sample line: “You’re what a great a crowd big smiles the ratings”. (Later, an orange-bellied insect in The Hell Poem speaks with an eerily similar instinct for le mot injuste.) Mocking a populist orator’s word-salad by turning it into unpunctuated pentameter is an entertaining trick, if not a new one; it’s exactly the same trick EE Cummings pulled a century ago in “Next to of course god america i”. If that were all this poem was doing, it’d be a good wheeze. What makes it virtuoso satire is that there’s something different happening in almost every line. McCrae swerves between styles and moods – arch, furious, despairing. Like something out of late Yeats, the president is “both swan and horseman trumpeting/ From the back of the beast”; mischievously quoting a bit of Four Quartets, McCrae sees “the fire and rose are one/ On the president’s bright head    the flames implanted/ To make a gilded crown”. But the laughs fall away when we reach the starkness of this:

The body    of  a storm is a man’s body

It has an eye and everything in the eye

Is dead     a calm     man is a man who has

Let weakness overcome his urge for death

The glue holding such different styles together is rhythm. McCrae’s prosody is very distinctive. The typical McCrae line is neat pentameter or tetrameter, but in disguise. There are mid-line gaps; words are cut in half by line-breaks; unpunctuated half-phrases stumble over each other. It’s something slick and difficult, made to look like something simple and clumsy, a technique best seen in a poem where he stutteringly reassembles a childhood memory of a car accident: “in the back   seat we were we my grand/-mother and I were passing the it must/Have been a mall”. It’s hard to do it justice with a short quotation, but over long stretches it creates a vivid sense of voice.

The typical McCrae line gets dragged down a whirlpool at the start of The Hell Poem, along with the poet, whose tale of being pulled from its “pixelated white” water into a Bosch-like inferno below is printed in fragments spiralling down the page. This funny and frightening mini-epic ends with the poet’s sweary bird guide (a distant cousin of Ted Hughes’s Crow?) finally disappearing “like/Paper burned loose from the kindling/And flying from the fire”.

The Hell Poem is the second part of A Fire in Every World, a Divine Comedy of sorts, spread across McCrae’s three most recent books. The first part is trapped in international publishing purgatory: it’s only available in America (boo!). But the book-length heaven section, Sometimes I Never Suffered, was published in the UK simultaneously with The Gilded Auction-Block. It is a gripping, sustained work of world-building invention. But for a coin-toss, it would have been my book of the month. In it, we see heaven through the eyes of a new arrival, Jim Limber, via a sequence of dramatic-monologue sonnets that (at their best) stand comparison with Gwendolyn Brooks’s.

Limber is a real historical figure: a mixed-race boy taken away from his mother by the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and raised for a year – at the height of the Civil War – as part of the Davis family. It’s tempting to speculate that McCrae was drawn to Limber’s story by parallels between their lives. The poet, himself mixed-race, was separated from his black father at the age of three and raised by his maternal grandparents, who were hardcore white supremacists. That poem about the car accident, titled “Remembering My Grandmother who Loved Me and Hated Everybody Like Me”, is about much more than a car accident. In it, McRae writes: “I/Remember her teaching me how to hail/Hitler us shouting in the living room”. On its own, it would be a piece of confessional poetry; in this book, it’s part of the scarred flesh of the monster made of America, a creature on the verge of tearing itself apart by the stitches.