Shane McCrae talks to Emily Berry

The Poetry Society

Spend 30 engrossing minutes in the company of the award-winning US poet Shane McCrae and Review editor Emily Berry as they discuss Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ as the trigger, when he was just 15, of McCrae’s poetry career; John Keats and the Gothic; George Herbert; and McCrae's conversion from free verse to metrical verse. ‘I can only recommend that everyone abandon the way they’ve been writing and see what happens if they write in a different way,’ he says. Fascinating on the ‘productive panic’ of building a collection, McCrae also gives wonderful readings of his poems published in the autumn 2021 issue of The Poetry Review: 'Explaining My Appearance in Certain Pictures', 'The Fungus Called Dead Man’s Fingers' and 'The Dead Negro in the Modernist Long Poem'.