AS a schoolgirl in the 1980s Edinburgh’s Makar, Hannah Lavery, was placed in remedial English. As the former English teacher turned award-winning playwright and poet recollects, she and many classmates had something in common – the colour of their skin.

The autobiographical poem recording the experience appears in Lavery’s debut collection Blood Salt Spring, published by Polygon this month. “Backwards” sees the poet’s white mother vocally defend her daughter’s literary aptitude while the young Lavery, alongside the other “brown kids”, remains “muted”.

“It’s only my Father/they see”, the child acknowledges with a painful acuity for one so young. Now the poet is being seen and heard.

Although the collection is her first, Lavery, who was appointed Edinburgh Makar in September last year, has gained traction with spoken-word performances, small press publishing and as a writer and director with National Theatre of Scotland plays The Drift and Lament for Sheku Bayoh.

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Like her previous work, Blood Salt Spring offers a personal response to wider cultural conversations from national identity to personal autonomy, divisive politics to mothering during lockdown. Its terrain is vast. Its perspective unequivocal. The question is: can she bring her reader with her?

“I wanted to create a collection that felt like it was a journey for the reader,” Lavery tells me over Zoom. She’s been walking the dog in the woods overlooking her East Lothian home and hasn’t yet washed her hair. Perhaps it’s Lavery’s warm affability, or her recognisably Scottish self-depreciation that prompts me to confess I’m still in pyjama bottoms and need a cup of tea. She goes to get juice. I sip from my mug.

Lavery was born “an Edinburgh girl” in the late 1970s to an English mother and Scottish mixed-race father. Her paternal grandmother, a “refugee then war bride” of Burmese Anglo-Indian and Jamaican extraction, fled her home country after the Japanese invasion in 1942, later settling with Lavery’s grandfather in the Scottish capital.

Concerns over what it means to be “at home” span the collection’s tripartite structure, which documents the poet’s early life, her recent reflections and future hopes. “When you’re brown and Scottish, you often feel that your utterances are seen by other people as a truth for a whole community,” Lavery says, noting that in Blood, Salt, Spring she speaks for herself.

“What I wanted to create in this collection,” the poet tells me “was like: ‘come sit and see the world from where I am right now.’”

It might be the Zoom aesthetic, the slightly-lagging face-to-face of post-pandemic communication, that makes the poet’s words reverberate so ardently. Just as the past two years have affected present discourse (this piece and Lavery’s collection are no exception), for the poet, engaging with the cultural concerns of “right now”, means feeling the effects of the past.

“It felt to me,” she says, reflecting on the “national conversation” that emerged from the Black Lives Matter movement, “that I was being asked to relive live old traumas”.

It’s a conversation worth having, Lavery quickly notes, as her poem “Scotland You’re No Mine” pays tribute. The forceful lyric demands “sweet forgetful Caledonia” wipe clear its “sepia-tinged” glasses and re-evaluate Scotland’s colonial opportunism. Its punctuating anger is underpinned “longing”.

“It’s a love poem to Scotland”, Lavery explains. It’s somewhat surprising for a poem that’s final line contains one of five “f**k yous” to the nation. Yet perhaps it’s dissonance that vocalises the condition of being a non-white Scot whose experience is: “I dinnae belong”.

From childhood tears to continued self-doubt, Lavery shows the emotional detriment of perceiving difference as undesirable: “growing up/it gets you/smaller”, her verse gently ventures. Tender accounts of family life during lockdown equally fulfil Lavery’s remit “to make room for empathy”. Not all the collection’s works perform this task with ease. “I’m not going to rise up…/I’m not taking this on./I’m not fighting/your opinions./Not today” one poem reads. Its non-apologetic stance edges towards what might be perceived as cancel culture.

When prompted to consider if it might not extend “the sense of invitation” she hopes to offer, Lavery’s answer breathes new energy into the piece. “It came from a real exhaustion,” she discloses, later adding: “I think this whole collection is about who gets to interpret and who gets to define you.”

It’s an issue her poem “Flying Bats” takes up. When an eager audience member interprets the poet-speaker’s use of “found nests” as “a metaphor for immigration”, they are swiftly undercut. “I was just writing about this wood/at the back of my house” the speaker informs us. The lyric’s deeper point about reading skin colour into poetry is resonant. At the same, its anxiety over interpretation elicits complex questions about who gets to speak and who gets to silence.

“Our strength is our difference./ Dinny fear it. Dinny caw canny,” writes former national Makar Jackie Kay in Threshold. A celebration of Scottish diversity, the poem’s “canny” punning of “can’t” and “knowledge” might also be read as a caution (another meaning of ‘canny’) against rejecting an ofttimes troubling onus not to silence discourse, regardless of political, social or racial differences.

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Various forms of silencing live on Lavery’s page. The collection’s numerous ellipses, paratheses and hyphens, though dense, cogently capture what the poet describes as “the way that people who live in the margins talk to each other”. “Where we don’t have to say [the racist word]” she says, leaving the blanks, “We know the end of that sentence”.

Everyday Racism witnesses a mother comforting her child, “Hush – now. Hush – now. Hush – now. Hush – now—/”, she says. “Mum, they called me a.../” “Hush now. Hush now. Hush—” the mother repeats. Recounting the true-to-life event and the poem, the mum of three leans close towards the screen. “Hush – now. Hush – now”, Lavery utters, her hand beating her chest. The performance poet is in her element.

Up close and off the page, it’s hard not to find convergence with Lavery. It’s an attestation, one might venture, to conversation’s canny capacity to elicit empathy. In Blood Salt Spring, many will be assuaged by her deeply personal narratives.

“We took what we were given/and spun a web,” Lavery writes, her words loosely connecting to those of recently instated national Makar, Kathleen Jamie. “We do language like spiders do webs,” Jamie has said. “Language”, she tenders, is “where we’re at home, that’s our means of negotiating with the world”.

The act of negotiation evokes a certain paradox for the junior Makar. Language is, after all, the tool Lavery uses to express her perception of not being “at home”. “I was drawn in border lines” the collection’s final poem tells us. “That’s the reality of me”, the poet explains. “I’m Scotland, and”. Lavery’s ellipsis fills silence with meaning. By looking backwards, the poet has moved forwards. As for the future, her hopes will surely be realised over next three years as Edinburgh’s city Makar.