Virgin, by Hollie McNish review: 'angry, funny and explicit'
In her latest poetry collection, Hollie McNish approaches the subject of virginity in a way which is characteristically frank and forthright, writes Susan Mansfield
The word “virgin” has too much power, and for all the wrong reasons, contends Hollie McNish in this book-length reckoning with the concept. It’s an “idea created by those in power” (not women) by which people (women) are “blamed, shamed, pressured, tortured, dehumanised”.
Poet and spoken-word artist McNish is the author of four collections of poetry, two of poetry and prose and and an award-winning verse memoir. In this latest book of poems, she approaches her subject in a way which is characteristically frank and forthright, variously angry, funny, confrontational and explicit.
“This soft, six-letter word”, she says, has been thoughtlessly imbibed for generations, affecting much of what we think about sex, relationships and our own bodies. She approaches it from all angles, from the idealised purity of the Virgin Mary in the nativity play to the “body-count numbers” bandied about by young men measuring potential wives according to the number of sexual partners they’ve had.
She’s funny and tender about being a teenager, a first kiss “sunbrellaed by the low white blossom” of a hawthorn. After losing her own virginity, she describes hilariously coming home to eat mashed potato with her family, fraught with worry that the change is somehow obvious.
Perhaps the sting can be taken out of the word “virgin”, she suggests, by applying it to other things we do for the first time, or things we haven’t done: books unread, ice cream flavours untasted. Elsewhere she relates it to things which are kept unused (her grandmother’s second sitting room), and the way modern consumers obsess about the new and untouched. Could lovers, she asks, come “pre-loved”, like second-hand clothes?
While she eschews traditional poetic forms, there is plenty of inventiveness on the page: one poem is a spiral, one slants across the page in waves; one is a crossword, another instructions for making an origami swan. At the times she decides to lean in to the lyrical, there is some lovely phrasing.
Beneath the marshalled arguments and conversational musings, there’s a deeper current about innocence and experience. One of the first poems is about snow, which returns us to a state of childhood exuberance. There are laments for innocence lost too soon due to societal pressures or to abuse; she writes in her introductory essay that she will only describe as sex that which is positive and consensual.
Some of the most beautiful writing here is not about sex but about the companionable touch of habituated lovers; one of the sexiest poems starts with doing a tax return in pyjamas. A found poem taken from the comments on a porn website reveals a longing for affection and intimacy. She returns to snow in a later poem, titled croissants, warm: “let my body, now fully attuned to your touch / be like noticing snow start to fall / and still rushing to put on your hat and your gloves”. It reads like a kind of innocence regained.
Virgin, by Hollie McNish, Fleet, £14.99
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