The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate by Rachel McCrum

There is a particular thrill at getting your hands on the book of a poet you normally encounter in more impermanent, intangible forms: readings, podcasts, installations. It’s a thrill shared by many as Rachel McCrum’s first full collection, The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, hits the bookshops. McCrum has been a champion of live literature in Scotland, and her poems – irreverent, heart-wrenching, rallying – have etched themselves into the literary landscape of the country she has now left behind.

The collection defies easy categorisation. Read from front to back it offers glimpses of a journey from a Northern Irish adolescence, via a collection of rented rooms, to an attempt at a life in which “I no longer miss myself.” Wryly compassionate, the series of poems ‘Problems to sharpen the young’ offers a neat parody of those bizarre questions we all remember from maths textbooks, but needles out a finer truth – that human lives cannot be reduced to equations.

There are poems of the sea, bracing and surprising as spray-slapped salt air. Most intriguing are pieces like ‘Take Me to Market, Mother Dear’: told in contradictory voices, they draw the reader in as interpreter, judge, jury. And of course these are poems for today, rallying cries for “unsilent / unwatchful women”,  which harness the rage of the past year with humour, passion and delightful monstrosity.