The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate by the inaugural BBC Scotland Poet-In-Residence Rachel McCrum is both lyrical and gentle, demanding and fierce as it carves its own path through themes of family, place, environment, and repression. The poems in the collection are fragments of McCrum's sea-bourne journey from Northern Island, across Scotland, and alighting in Canada. It's a collection about leaving home and what you take with you. .