Poetry reviews: Everything Everyday by Hannah Lavery | The Vulnerability of Precious Things by Tom Pow
To read the new poetry collection from Hannah Lavery is to experience the world as filtered through the tiny, often toxic screen of a smartphone, writes Roger Cox
Much has been made of the impossibility of being a comedian in the current political climate: how to find the funny when the news is so unremittingly bleak, and when so many of the major players on the world stage are so far beyond parody? It's telling that in the US these days John Stewart often gets the biggest laughs on the Daily Show simply by reading out something Donald Trump has just said and then raising an ironic eyebrow.
It's a tricky time to be a poet, too, although here the problem is more one of focus: with so many things going wrong at the same time, is it appropriate to engage with one without at least acknowledging some of the others? Is it even possible to concentrate on one particular crisis when all our ills seem to be increasingly interlinked?
As the title of her third poetry collection suggests, in Everything Everyday Hannah Lavery adopts a deliberately widescreen approach to the Great Unravelling of the early 21st century, taking in everything from the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza to the suffering of Hungarian activists under Viktor Orbán, and referencing both the unimaginably vast tragedies of climate change and global environmental degradation and the intimate, personal tragedies of lost friends.
On reflection, "widescreen" is perhaps an ill-fitting word to describe Everything Everyday, because to read this collection is to experience the world as filtered through the tiny, often toxic screen of a smartphone. Social media platforms like Facebook, X and WhatsApp feature at regular intervals. In the poem "Bed Rot" Lavery writes "Scrolling through my phone / for a fill for the hollow that has opened up in me, / that has spread through me. Diseased. I confuse reality / wi apocalyptic TV." You'd be hard-pushed to find a pithier or more on-point summation of what it feels like to inhabit these febrile times. And just as Lavery highlights how our smartphones expose us to a never-ending stream of bad news from every corner of the globe, she also shows their power to cause us very specific, personal harm. In "Livin an Breathin" she writes: "After the publication of your opinion piece: / This is the week Scotland was forced / to confront its role in... / You copy and paste the racist emails / you received and post them / for your friends on Facebook."
On first reading, Everything Everyday can feel overwhelming, which, given the subject matter, may well be part of the point. The division of the book into seasons, though, and the dating of all the poems, does at least give the drowning-not-waving reader an overarching structure to cling to, and on second reading more subtle patterns and undercurrents start to emerge, not least through the repeated appearances of three talismanic female creatures - Beira, goddess of winter, bearing witness outside the Scottish Parliament; Sister Icarus, full of concern for her ill-fated brother; and Tahlequah, an orca grieving the loss of a calf. This elemental trio offers a reassuring feminine counterweight to the (mostly male) violence of the world, and towards the end there are at least subtle intimations of hope, as in "Kittiwake", which concludes: "The world is burning. The news is ash. / But here, the sea speaks in returnin tide."
It has become common, in the last few years, for commentators to draw parallels between our own era and the 1930s, when widespread financial hardship across Europe and associated feelings of hopelessness allowed far-right politicians to seize power by sowing division. It was during this period, in between helping communists escape from Nazi Germany and fighting (extremely ineffectually) for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War, that the French philosopher, teacher and activist Simone Weil wrote some of her most important work, so it's a timely moment for Tom Pow to release The Vulnerability of Precious Things - a book of poems billed as "a work of imaginative empathy that makes clear Weil's relevance to the world today."
Although some of the poems address well-known aspects of her thought head-on ("Roots, 1943", for example, which engages with her ideas about patriotism and "rootedness"), where Pow really excels is in the moments where he gives us brief, sharp glimpses of Weil the person. In "Portrait" he writes of her "mind purged / of compromise"; in "Resistance, 1941" he describes her demeanour under interrogation, having been arrested for "shit-stirring" in Vichy France, as like "a dowdy / bird of prey, eyes piercing / but aloof"; and in the poem "Her Hands", concerning her school days, he has one of her teachers say she hammers her points home "as if she were writing / with a navvy's pick". In the 2020s, as in the 1930s, we need more people like Weil - and like Lavery - who are willing and able to wield a verbal pick-axe.
Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises, by Hannah Lavery, Polygon, £10.99; The Vulnerability of Precious Things: Encounters with Simone Weil, by Tom Pow, Mariscat/Molecular, £12
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