Mule, Shane McCrae’s first book of
poetry, is a sequence of elliptical lyrics that deals, mostly, with the
subjects of growing up bi-racial in Texas, fathering a special-needs child,
getting married, and going through a divorce. These subjects are mostly dealt in reverse chronological order, so that the first poem in the first
section begins, “And we divorced…”, while five out of the six poems in the
second section begin, “We married…”
If the content of
McCrae’s poetry is domestic, the themes are more often about the universal,
almost epic, struggle that happens within that sphere when we strive for a
sense of place and belonging in an imperfect society, and when we search for
meaning, certainty, and control in a larger cosmos that is constantly reminding
us that most of the stuff in our lives is beyond our control:
We married in a taxi
in Chica-
go mid- November
in the long wind blowing
Our son has autism
married in the back
Seat of a taxi
slipping in the wind
We’ll never have you
said another child
On Michigan and on
our left the lake
The long white shadow
of the lake in the blowing
Wind and what
happens you asked when we die
Who will take care of
him…
from
“[We married in a taxi]”
Along with the
backward movement of the personal narrative, McCrae employs certain stylistic
and musical elements that simultaneously—and ironically—unsettle and unify the
collection. Visually, the most obvious of these are the double spacing, the
caesura, and the backslash. These three elements combined create a D.A. Powell
or Jorie Graham-like “look” that trademarks the McCrae poem, or at least the
McCrae poem as we know it in Mule. The
caesura traditionally signals a natural break or breath in the line, while the
backslash is synonymous with a line break—which also signals a brief pause;
however, in Mule,
McCrae constantly undermines these expectations to create a line within the
line, a suggested break before the true break, hinting at the poem underneath
the poem that—like the marriage, the family, and the future—might have been.
From “In No Place”:
Already sit and don’t
go out
in an-/ y sudden
every sudden thing and
we
In any hurry turn to
salt and break /The farther I
run far from you the
less/ I feel my own body
and turn to salt /
and break and hurry
have
to get now back/ Home
to Chicago every sudden thing/ Marries
The music of
McCrae’s poetry is also achieved through repetition. One would be hard pressed
to find a poet writing today who uses it to the extent that McCrae does in Mule. It is purposefully overdone to varying effects (nagging,
comic, manic, and ruminative, to name a few) and to varying degrees of success. It’s the overdoing of something that is by definition a do-over, a repeating,
that gives McCrae’s work an irreverent confidence that the reader comes to
trust over the course of the collection. Here’s an example from “In the Garden
of the Ghosts of the Garden”:
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
We held our arms
above our heads for for-
ty days supported by
the water and
Weighed down by the
water…
Shane McCrae is the author of the chapbooks One
Neither One
(Octopus Books) and In Canaan (Rescue Press). His work has appeared in African
American Review, Agni, The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Effing
Magazine, Typo
and The Best American Poetry 2010. He holds degrees from Linfield College, the University
of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Harvard Law School, and is currently pursuing a
PhD in English at the University of Iowa. He is married, and has three
children.
Craig Blais’s poems are in Best New
Poets, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,
Sentence, and The
Pinch. His
first-book manuscript, About Crows, has been a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, the
National Poetry Series, the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and the Brittingham
and Pollak Poetry Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press.