Ways and means
Poetry outshines prose in Hollie McNish’s “hybrid text”, which explores gender, parenting, sex and feminism.
Iwas excited to get my hands on Ted Hughes Award-winning UK poet Hollie McNish’s new book, Slug: And other things I’ve been told to hate. I first encountered McNish a few years ago when her account of early motherhood, Nobody Told Me, knocked me out. It was one of the best and most honest depictions of the shock arrival of this new identity, “mother”, with all its joy, pain and indignity.
Nobody Told Me was a hybrid text, part poetry collection, part prose memoir, and McNish returns to this formula with
Slug, albeit on a grander scale. Clocking in at 482 pages, it comprises seven themed sections – “Endings”, “Growing Up”, “Parenting”, “Mirrors”, “Masturbation”, “Blood” and “Strangers” – all thrillingly candid and thought-provoking. Each consists of one or two essays, several poems and a thematically linked short story.
In her introduction, McNish offers “Seven Ways to Read this Book”. The first is the standard way; the second is to read the poems and ignore the prose. (The sixth is what to do if you’re just here for the fingering poems, which gives a good indication of why McNish is also a wildly popular performance poet.)
Perhaps I should have tried out method two, but I’m old school, and she did say she had worked hard on the underlying order, so I read from cover to cover. Unfortunately, this didn’t reward as it could have
– my enjoyment of the poems, which are generally excellent, was undermined by the less-compelling prose.
I got the feeling that either someone had been in McNish’s ear about branching out or strengthening her intellectual rigour or she had given herself that challenge, maybe feeling she had something to prove
It’s powerful to read McNish describe watching her grandmother’s funeral online, then read the poems she wrote immediately afterwards.
to the literary establishment. But it wasn’t necessary on either score. The poems are plain-spoken, yes, simple even, but they’re also elegant, artful and evocative. They stand up.
The essays, unfortunately, are not as good. Their ideas are excellent – challenging provocations on gender, parenting, sex and feminism – and there is often funny and illuminating material, but they read like first drafts. It’s as if McNish has been given a free-writing assignment, then published the results. They would have benefited from more editing and reworking. They can also undermine the poems by introducing central ideas and images and explaining the context before we get to the poems themselves, lessening the effect of the otherwise striking imagery. Sometimes we don’t need to know the conditions under which the art was produced – or at least not until we’ve digested the primary work.
The one exception is the first section, “Endings”, which relates McNish’s response to the death of her maternal grandmother during the height of the UK’s Covid restrictions in 2020. An excerpt from this section was published online in May and it is beautiful, raw and moving. It’s powerful to read McNish describe watching her grandmother’s funeral online, then read the poems she wrote immediately afterwards.
There’s a lot to love about this book, and I’ll be passing it enthusiastically around my artist/writer/mother friends. But if you get a copy, try method two: read the poems first. Or, you know, go straight to “fingering to ed sheeran’s shape of you”. After all, as McNish says, “i do not meditate, i masturbate / i simply don’t have time for both”. l