Book review: Blood Salt Spring, by Hannah Lavery

The debut collection from Edinburgh’s new Makar moves from poignant lyricism to Informationist-style interrogation of language, writes Stuart Kelly
Hannah LaveryHannah Lavery
Hannah Lavery

Increasingly, I think poetry too wee a word for such a vast phenomenon. Over a long January I have read and re-read a lot of poetry, from Denise Riley’s Say Something Back to Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno to Emily Dickinson ad infinitum to a lot of working class and unacknowledged writers from the early 19th century. Wittgenstein had a query about games: what quality do all games, from Solitaire to rugby to Hungry Hippos possess that we call them games. He might not have actually mentioned Hungry Hippos, but the point stands. What do all kinds of poetry have in common that we call them poems? This niggled at my brain for longer perhaps than it ought to have done.

People read, and know, and love poetry for differing reasons. Its diversity is its strength, and a strange weakness. For every person who says “my child could do better than that”, there is another who says “this touched me, and made me want to read more”. If everyone agreed all of the time about everything, then I would be worried.

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This range in the reading experience is important. Some poems confront and some console, some are polemical and some are cautious, some are celebratory and some elegiac, some are extravagant and some oblique. There ought not to be any value judgement between these different registers. The reader’s taste will tell where they go next, and should be open to being challenged or confirmed in turn.

Blood Salt Spring, by Hannah LaveryBlood Salt Spring, by Hannah Lavery
Blood Salt Spring, by Hannah Lavery

I apologise for the scene-setting, but it seems necessary when approaching Hannah Lavery’s debut collection, Blood Salt Spring. Let me say now, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”. I am white, male, middle-aged, heterosexual, educated at Oxford, possess four three piece tweed suits and am an elder in the Church. I am Privilege Personified, except for the bank balance. Therefore a question occurs: am I the audience or the target of a book which foregrounds being excluded, overlooked and threatened? In “Backwards” Lavery writes “She corrals us brown kids / into Remedial, muted / in our mothers’ tongues / though here, it’s only / my father they see”. This is a book seamed with anger. “I’m not going to rise up. / I’m not going to stand up / and fist up and kneel down / I’m not taking this on. / I’m not fighting / your opinions. / Not today”, and later in the same poem, “I’m levelling down / each level down”. This has urgency and sincerity, both of which are admirable. Is it something one would read twice? The opening of “Scotland, You’re No Mine” begins “(you were no his) / and I don’t want you”, continuing “Ya macaroon. Ya rotten / gobby, greedy, thieving bastard you / sitting atop a that shite and broken bones” ending, “With love, f*** you”. Lavery has recently been made the new Makar for the City of Edinburgh. Some decide that such a role is to be accessible to those without the chance encounter of poetry, some think it is to leave a honed memorial. Both are legitimate approaches.

The collection moves from rather poignant lyricism, particularly about her problematic relationship with her father, to Informationist-style co-opting of forms of language, as in “The Anti-Racist Working Group”, or “Thirty Laughing Emojis” or “Outwith (Writing Workshop On Zoom)”. The last section is rather too insistent on poems about “being a poet”, with a kind of fading cadence. “Poetry Platforms” ends with the lines “it’s all this I think / and other stuff too”, which makes me wonder what said stuff is. The same poem – Lavery has a habit of italics – says “Poetry and I. / Poetry and me”. Parse of that what you will. A lot of these works reveal their background as performance pieces, and the author’s note thanks various venues and cabarets. I can imagine that these lines – “Hush – now. Hush – now. Hush – now. Hush – now – / Mum, they called me a… / Hush now. Hush now. Hush –“ might be effective when spoken. Written, the reader has to infer whether the tone is caring, angry, regretful or accusatory. Likewise “All hail the witch! / All hail! All hail the witch!” might work on the stage but the page is a stark background.

At the same time I was sent a copy of Roughly Speaking, by Eddie Gibbons, subtitled “New & Rejected Poems”. On the back of the book are the usual accolades alongside letters from magazines declining to publish him, so the game is basically “what did someone else not think good enough”. It is also embellished with his own collage images that ping-pong off the poems. Lavery has an unspooled quality – what might be called WYSIWYG poetry – whereas Gibbons is more like the later Byron. The rhymes are brilliantly awful, the wink is perpetual, but it is just as angry and important as Lavery’s book. It is also more experimental. “An Erasure” is an Oulipo experiment that merges conspiracy with randomness. The collage images – Theresa May via Edvard Munch – ought to get him commissions for national newspapers. One poem, “after Tom Waits”, is called “What’s He Writing?”, with the solemn, acerbic lines “I’ll tell you one thing. / He’s not building a career in poetry”. Perhaps he has, in an askance manner.

Blood Salt Spring, by Hannah Lavery, Polygon, £9.99

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