Packed night of poetry from Michael Pedersen, Hollie McNish and Gill Shaw
Michael Pedersen, Hollie McNish and Gill Shaw
Eden Court
5 stars
The thing about poetry being read out loud is that when it’s at its most brilliant, it’s like watching words being juggled in three dimensions.
And along with the fizzing energy, humour and warmth between the poets and the audience, these spoken words made this night of three poets at Eden Court something special.
Even the people Hollie McNish joked might just have been "dragged along" by well-meaning friends would have been struggling not to have fun.
Easy humour, effervescent, fast-moving stories, surreal touches from Michael Pedersen and searing honesty from Hollie McNish about everything from parenting to the mysteries of love-making (the wonderful/ terrible story of Yanking), were just a few of the elements that made the evening zip by.
Breezy chat from Michael and his scene-setting back to lockdown when he said hours were spent in his flat feeling he should be writing poetry, led up to introducing his rather special clipboard.
How special, he proved with a story from a recent reading and signing, where he told us he had noticed a woman in the queue bobbing restlessly about as people asked Hollie lots of questions as they got their books signed.
“She only had one question for me – why?” he joked.
“No, not really. It was where had I got my clipboard from – and she didn’t even buy a book!”
But there was no such trouble at Inverness where plenty of people of a wide age span wanted to buy – only with a card reader on the blink, the queue of eager poetry fans for Michael and Hollie’s books had to resort to older methods, such as cash.
The night offered a delicate balance between – entertaining (with one example being Michael’s next book’s title poem The Cat Prince, about his childhood alter ego) and his always unique use of words, as in The Tough Mudder, a constipation epic – and connecting with emotions, as with the poignant story of his last book, Boy Friends which evolved from a grief memoir into a celebration of friendship as he remembered his late friend Scott Hutchison.
But as the poet told us, his editor at publisher Faber said: “… don’t shy away from the gnarly mess of grief”.
Hollie McNish – introduced by Michael as "my favourite person in the world" who has been a Sunday Times bestseller with her collection Slug And Other Things I’ve Been Told To Hate – has plenty of tough questions to ask the world and her readers. She is fearlessly honest too, as in her poem The Day I Stopped Nicking Teabags From Hotels which drew a confession from her that though she doesn't do it any more, she had been briefly tempted to take some teabags from Eden Court’s green room backstage before the show, but had resisted. In the poem she reveals her granny first set her off – “this is your fault granny that I am like this” – with this family tradition.
Afterwards, she told us: “My mum has been telling me to say it’s my dad’s side of the family…”
Family and working out new and not so new definitions of family came in the poems of Gill Shaw from Dingwall who had been invited by Michael and Hollie to join them for the show.
Last year Michael and Hollie had been tutoring a special group at Moniack Mhor and Michael revealed he and Hollie had “bonded” with Gill who, he said, “is going on to exciting stuff”. This includes next month’s release of her pamphlet of poems Touching Air from Stewed Rhubarb Press.
In her poem written in response to the suggestion that Gill, who is a parent of “an incredible kid” with her ex-wife, is not a mother if not by biology, shared perhaps a redefining truth in the line “It’s the kick you feel inside someone else’s body”. Her image, familiar but uniquely her own, also captured mother and baby: "It's the squeeze of four tiny fingers round your pinkie".
And from poems written looking at the Japanese art of kintsugi (broken things mended with gold) and philosophy of wabi-sabi (imperfect), the poet read her own I Reflect On Our Relationship Through The Lens Of Wabi-Sabi and its very wabi-sabi sounding “Never was an ending wept so tenderly”.
Introducing Hollie before the second half, Michael had suggested: “You won’t have seen Hollie before, so if you enjoy tonight, clap, she might come back.”
Hopefully these poets got the OneTouch crowd’s enthusiastic message …
For more about the poets: Michael Pedersen: michaelpedersen.co.uk Hollie McNish: holliepoetry.com and Gill Shaw: Facebook @gill_shaw_writes
