Interview: Hannah Lavery Explores Grief, Hope and ‘Everything Everyday’ at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

Hannah Lavery’s latest book of poetry Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises marries global politics with the intensely personal to create a collection for our times. SNACK caught up with the former Edinburgh Makar ahead of an appearance at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival to learn more about these new poems and the motivations behind them.

Can you talk about the inspirations behind Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises?

Essentially it began as an attempt to capture a year. I wanted to track how we live through the current crises: the drip of bad news, the horrors of the world we witness through the screens in our hands, the rituals that try to steady us, and the private reckonings with our own complicity. Questions about what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a friend, a citizen; a human in this moment, haunt the collection.

The structure it follows is the cycle of the seasons. How do the poems change as time passes?

I organised the book around the seasons because a year gives you return and reset. I also threaded a sonnet cycle through the year that follows three mythic women, which gave me a tighter formal spine to hold the chaos. As the months pass the poems tighten and repeat images so that accumulation becomes the point; motifs come back altered, lines echo, and the reader feels how patterns persist.

In part due to the structure, it has the feel of a poetic diary. How did the collection come together? How were the poems written?

I set myself a discipline: a poem a week. Not every poem survived the edit, but the practice forced me to write into the moment. Many pieces began as notes, overheard lines, headlines, fragments of song. The diary feeling comes from that weekly insistence. I wanted the collection to feel like a living record.

You move between the political and personal, often in the same poem. Can you talk about that aspect?

For me the political and the personal are not separate, and so I write that way because it’s how I honestly experience the world. Combining the two is a refusal to flatten either. The poems try to show how a headline becomes a wound in a household, a violence. It’s an ethical move as much as an aesthetic one, insisting that the systemic has human faces and that intimate stories are not merely anecdote but evidence.

Do you feel it has become too easy for people to look away, or become numbed, to events?
Yes. The constant stream of images and outrage produces a protective numbness which can lead to a dehumanisation of others and I would argue finally of ourselves.

I wanted to challenge that numbing in myself and in the reader, to create poems that demand attention.

A number of poems are dedicated to, or reference, the late Beldina Odenyo, who readers may know as the musician Heir of the Cursed. Can you talk about Beldina and the impact she has had on you?

Bel was one of the most important creative relationships in my life. Her music as Heir of the Cursed held vulnerability and ferocity together in a way that taught me about voice and risk. Her presence in my work is a way of keeping her close.

I feel there is a duality of desperation and defiance in Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises. What were your primary emotions behind the poetry?

There is definitely a duality. Desperation from witnessing harm and the fatigue of trying to change and live within systems that resist. Defiance in the refusal to accept that fatigue as final. Anger, tenderness, and stubborn hope live together on the page; I wanted those emotions to complicate one another rather than resolve neatly.

We’ve talked about the substance of the collection, but what about the style? How important is that to you?

Style matters. Form is part of the argument. The sonnet structure held so much of the year’s chaos and is a form I keep returning to because it contains pressure and release. I use repetition and shifts in voice to create pressure points where the reader has to pause and reconsider. Style is not ornament, it’s a method of thinking and feeling.

Do you feel art allows us to better understand the world, and each other?

I do. Art gives us ways to sit with each other and to hold complexity. It doesn’t hand out answers but it can change perception and open space for empathy.

What has been your experience of being Edinburgh’s Makar?

Being chosen to be Edinburgh’s Makar was an honour. It validated the civic role of poetry, and gave me opportunities to bring poetry into unexpected places, to invite other poets and artists to join me in challenging narratives of Edinburgh, and to reflect on my own relationship with my home city.

And you are going to be at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, alongside Jennifer Wong & Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe. Can you talk about the event?

I’m really looking forward to it. It feels like a conversation about language, belonging, and writing across borders. I’m excited for the exchange of perspectives and the chance to read alongside writers whose work I admire.

Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises is published by Polygon Books

Hannah Lavery, Jennifer Wong & Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe: Migratory Patterns is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 27th August

Photo credit: Kirsty Anderson