Songs and Sonnets, Shane McCRae (Broken Sleep, 2026)
Shane McRae’s previous books have been both religious and political, but in Songs and Sonnets, his new slim collection from Broken Sleep, he does not hold back from upfront critique, abuse and comment on the current USA president and administration. The poems take the form of sonnets, often with clever end-of-line rhymes but also a number of more deconstructed or free verse texts.
‘America your blood is poisoned’ states the second poem, giving – as do other poems – a sense of mourning and elegy to the more vitriolic work here. Many of the poems ventriloquize Trump’s lies and deceitful claims, his total self-obsession and incomprehension of the effects of his policies and statements on others, whilst other texts stand outside the craziness and offer commentary. The truth of ‘You don’t have power if no-one buys you power’ is in stark contrast to the craziness of other statements here:
But the stench slithers out the face but you
Can’t smell the poison when it’s your own breath
(‘Blank Verse Sonnet On Our Myths Excuse Us’)
Somebody kill wheoever made you cry
(‘Blank Verse Sonnet On America Is Listening’)
Get it in the mosques the speakers if they’re not too
Wrecked if we can’t we’ve got to wreck them more
(‘Petrarchan Sonnet On A Golden Age In Arts And Cullture Kash Patel Producer’)
Well let’s be honest who wants genocide
It’s bad for whole communities of people
[…]
and the third bird was peace
It would have covered Gaza like an iron
Springtime a Riviera what a beauty
I promise you once we’ve removed the bodies
(‘Elizabethan Sonnet On He Muses Upon The Deal That Wasn’t’)
I should not, however, suggest that these poems are purely about content, whether they are collages of reported speech or fictions about Trump’s thoughts (although I hate to use those two words next to each other) or not. McCrae is a clever and accomplished poet, able to use rhyme, half-rhyme and structure without any linguistic, syntactical or semantic contortions.
In ‘Spenserian Sonnet On He Considers Neighborliness’, McCrae effortlessly rhymes sweet and feet, spiders and providers and gliders, cleverly splits Can-ada across a line ending to rhyme with American, and makes good use of repetition: lots of ‘men’ who ‘are providers’, according to this poem, of ‘homemade gliders’ for ‘their pregnant women’ who are flown across the border into the States. Surely not? What the narrator wants to know is
Who pays for the air they’re gliding on in my
America there’s tarrifs on the air
America means promise everywhere
A strange idea of neighborliness, just as other poems evidence strange ideas about women, who are often seen as other (‘Who knows what women want I think they like / Me right they like me that’s what people say’), power (‘I will be an amazing Chairman I will be / The most amazing Chairman of the Board’), protestors (‘we have tear gas for the healthy ones’) and war (‘PICTURE THEM NAKED but I saw them dead’).
If it wasn’t so topical and of-the-moment this book would be laugh-out-loud funny, but even I am past finding Trump’s and the American political right’s self-delusion, chest-beating, threats and warmongering the slightest bit amusing. By amplifying the empty rhetoric and impossible promises being made, the egotistical commentary about themselves, McCrae allows his subjects to ridicule themselves, as the bullshit echoes endlessly repeat and answer back:
I turned because I couldn’t hear but what for
I heard a voice I didn’t know the voice
Until the bullet struck my ear was mine
(‘Petrarchan Sonnet On He Talks About The First Assassination Attempt’)
This is immediate, urgent poetry, poetry you should not miss out on as America becomes more and more unstable and dangerous. Hopefully, this book will one day become a period piece, evidence of a brief historical era we would all rather forget. Until then, as McCrae says in ‘Blank Verse Sonnet On Here We Go Again’, ‘America I feel your guilty shrugging’.
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Rupert Loydell
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