Everything Everyday

A Year of Empty Promises

Hannah Lavery author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Birlinn General

Published:7th May '26

Should be back in stock very soon

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Everything Everyday cover

Everything Everyday is a poetic journal of the year that charts winter through to autumn in a richly textured sequence of diary-poems, lyric fragments and a crown of sonnets.

Each month’s entry weaves together mythic figures – Tahlequah the mourning orca, Brigid’s mountain dance, Sister Icarus’s fragile flight and Beira’s shore vigils – with the unfolding chronicle of contemporary grief and protest. Readers move from January’s frozen harbour and political flashpoints into spring’s ritual planting of ‘lemon-drop’ seeds, summer’s drum-driven rallies and smoky vigils, and autumn’s oil-slick swans and ash-borne snowdrops. The collection’s formal innovations mirror its thematic urgency: bracketed interjections pulse like heartbeats, dated stanzas resonate like journal entries, and the season-by-season structure creates a mythic ledger of solidarity and hope. Lavery’s work becomes both witness and archive—where personal confession and public ritual converge in an unflinching testament to collective mourning, unbroken resilience, and the ember of promise that refuses to cool.

Each poem is an unflinching exploration of memory and identity in an era defined by both loss and possibility. Bold, uncompromising, and deeply resonant, Everything, Everyday invites you to confront the delicate art of living—and loving—in a world that is as beautiful as it is unpredictable.

'Everything Everyday is written with grace and beauty in the face of it all, offering hope when everything, every day, can seem hopeless. With its insistence on witness, this is one of the most radical and righteous books you'll read this year'

-- Alistair Braidwood * SNACK Magazine *

'We need more people like Lavery, who are willing and able to wield a verbal pick-axe'

-- Roger Cox * Scotland on Sunday *

'Tender, searching, and luminous'

-- Roger Robinson, Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

'Takes its audience from anger to hope and beyond'

* Sunday Post *

'The poems are both fierce and tender, celebrating resistance, speaking against everyday injustice'

* The Scotsman, Poem of the Week *

'A searing new poetry collection... the beauty of her poetry brings all the latent feelings, the ones we might have tried to scroll away from in these troubled times, firmly into focus'

* Bookseller, Author Foc

ISBN: 9781846977374

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 12mm

Weight: 117g

144 pages