on Helen Ivory

In Fever

Helen Ivory is known for slaying the demons of idealised femininity: her collection The Anatomical Venus (2019) ‘examines how women have been portrayed as “other”’ in a variety of different forms, (raging hysterics, beautiful wax corpses, a hanged woman), and she opens her new collection, Constructing a Witch, with a quote from her previous book –

drive your iron tongue into my mouth
        fell me of my speaking
      ride me through the streets dumb beast
this carnival     of spitting, pissing
you think this makes a manful man of you?

She seems to be summoning, as an act of rebellion against these ‘iron tongues’, the words of the pages that follow: a vast choir of women united across the centuries into this particular ‘otherness’ we have often called witch.

Constructing a Witch, despite its plethora of historical inspiration, is anything but archaic. Rather, it surpasses the limits of space and time into a kind of transcendent purgatory that welcomes the shift of form and voice the poems demand, and lets it run into a haunting but harmonised spell with Ivory’s own darkly enchanting voice at the fore.

In the poem ‘Protection Ink’, the (unidentified) speaker states ‘I do not speak of the stylings set on the page you are reading. The true words are drawn in an unbroken circle with me at the pivot.’ This captures the idea of Ivory as the vessel for the voices of the many women we hear throughout the collection; through her they commune; she is the spell caster. ...