Unwritten Woman, by Hannah Lavery review – 'an Edinburgh of uncertain foundations, restive ghosts haunting the haar'

This confident, distinctive collection from Edinburgh’s Makar brokers no easy peace with past or present, writes Susan Mansfield

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is set in London, but seems forever, in the imagination, an Edinburgh story: that conflicted identity, that shadow self.

The story haunts ‘edinburgh (is a story)’, Lavery’s prose-poem commissioned for the launch of the Edinburgh International Festival in 2022, which sits at the beginning of this collection like a prologue. The Edinburgh of this poem is a place of shifting identities, uncertain foundations, restive ghosts haunting the haar.

The first half of the book engages directly with Stevenson’s tale, its dramatis personae the women who exist at its margins, some from the novella – the girl trampled in the street, Jekyll’s housemaid Agnes, and others imagined – the poet, the dreamer, the conscience.

Hannah Lavery

They listen at doors and watch at windows, advise their daughters on how to walk home safely at night, hide their bruises. They know all too well what’s going on, and they can be quietly devastating: “if you mean to do him harm,/ you will get no noise from me/ [they put down their tea cups]/ but would you leave me/ the painting, annie?”.

These are delicate, fierce poems. Often the lines are short, the language conversational. They enter into a kind of dance with Stevenson, pulling out extracts to use as jumping off points. They are a dance of typography too: words fade or are crossed out, voices come in from either margin. She plays with white space, and that might be the point – these voices are conjured out of the silences of the original.

Often a phrase from the end of one poem becomes the title of the next, pulling the reader along. Lavery is an acclaimed playwright and has a natural sense of the spoken voice; sometimes she also includes stage directions.

The second half of the book is a sequence too, ‘Unwritten (…)’, which has its own list of Dramatis Personae including Jackie Kay, Alberta Whittle, Edinburgh sugar merchant William McDowell, a golliwog at the Museum of Childhood. Here, the spaces between the poems are punctuated with the voice of a Theatre Announcer, informing, hectoring, occasionally apologising.

After the focus of the first half, these poems are more disparate, but always come back, sooner or later, to Edinburgh, and to the experiences of people of colour in a (still overwhelmingly) white city. Though this section lacks the spell-like power of calling voices out of silence – the artists mentioned here, Kay, Whittle, the band Young Fathers, and Lavery herself, are all more than able to speak for themselves – it conjures a city haunted by unspoken prejudices and unwritten histories.

Lavery takes hold of them and skewers them to the page. And this helps, but it’s not a solution. “We hold no truck with neat endings,” she writes in ‘edinburgh (is a story)’. This confident, distinctive collection brokers no easy peace with past or present.

Unwritten Woman, by Hannah Lavery, Polygon, £10.99. Hannah Lavery is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 11, 15 and 16 August