Review: Hollie McNish / Vanessa Kisuule, The Lantern

“My shoulders are fucking delicious,” says Hollie McNish, drinking in claps and whoops from the sold-out, overwhelmingly female crowd at the end of her set. “No one’s told me, it’s just a fact.”

It’s a smart note to end on, bringing together McNish’s unassuming, finely balanced poems about life as it’s lived with the more strident, celebratory style of performance poet Vanessa Kisuule (pictured top), for whom McNish wrote the poem and who accompanies her for most of this tour. For my money the night belongs to Kisuule, new to most of the audience, which is to take nothing away from McNish’s honest, chatty and accomplished performance to a crowd of clearly devoted fans.

Kisuule has more work to do and achieves that work within the first three poems; McNish takes her time to get to her juiciest stuff, and even entertains us early on with some poems she wrote as a teenager, all clumsy rhymes and Eminem-inspired bravado. But by the end of the night, the audience are eating out of both performers’ hands.

Kisuule sets out her stall straight away with a direct appeal to anyone who feels slightly outside their place and time, perhaps because of their colour, or their gender identity, or because they have “at least 16 different responses to the question, ‘Where are you from?’”. The poem sets the inclusive tone for a barnstorming performance that provokes both laughs and tears of recognition throughout.

A particular highlight is Not Worth Shaving Your Arsehole For, which skewers Kisuule’s own hang-ups about dating as well as some of the men that the title describes. Elsewhere, her ruminations on how to raise a son as a feminist are poignant, thoughtful and unreservedly heartfelt. One or two poems veer a little too far into sentimentality for this reviewer’s tastes, but that’s a small price to pay for the irresistible sweep of Kisuule’s assured, genuinely life-affirming wordplay.

This gig sold out faster than any other on Hollie McNish’s current tour, which showcases new and lesser-known work from the large collection she’s just published, ordered chronologically by the age and stage of life that they deal with. It’s an open, intimate performance that treads a delicate line between poetry recital and confessional monologue. McNish often pauses mid-poem to give more background to a line or make an off-the-cuff joke, giving her performance the air of a work-in-progress show shared with fans, despite no poem being unfinished.

Hollie McNish

It’s no wonder McNish attracts such devotion from younger women, who make up about 90% of the audience here tonight. There’s stuff here that anyone who’s done the dance of Growing Up While Female will relate to: the awkward teenage disco, the first fuck vs the first orgasm (often years apart), the blow job you perform out of politeness (a poem she reads to solemn, disarmed silence, which she says is far preferable to the raucous laughter she sometimes gets in London).

For the few men who’ve come, this is an insight into a parallel but somewhat alien world, but there’s plenty of more universal experience explored here too: thoughts on a friend who died too young, for example, or how to explain news stories to your children when they involve things like politicians poking their bits into pigs.

The slight, unshowy poems are sometimes so slight and unshowy that you forget you’re listening to poetry at all, despite their finely honed rhythm, occasional rhyme and their beautifully timed punchlines. McNish’s gentle, almost shy stage presence means the sucker-punch of pathos or humour in each poem often seems to come from nowhere. She’s a poet who rewards close listening and patience, which she receives in bundles tonight.

I’d urge anyone with an interest in poetry, humour, or even just life in all its messiness to see Kisuule; and McNish deserves her growing fanbase which, at risk of labouring the point, could happily include more men. These women won’t bite, but when their poetry does, it’s fucking delicious.

Hollie McNish and Vanessa Kisuule played The Lantern, Colston Hall on Saturday, June 24.

Read more: Interview: JJ Bola