(MatHat Press 2023)
This book is a made up of selected poems from all of my books (listed below) , and includes images of some of my collages and assemblages. Here is the link on the MadHat website:madhat-press.com/products/wunderkammer
Here is a wonderful, comprehensive review written by the brilliant Norman Finkelstein www.poetryinreview.com/reviews/wunderkammer.html
(Bloodaxe, 2019)
An Anatomical Venus – which gives this book its title – was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men who studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking.
Helen Ivory’s new collection The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with ‘Housewife Psychosis’ recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others shut inside cabinets of curiosity.
The book can be ordered here: www.bloodaxebooks.com
Some reviews:
http://everybodysreviewing.blogspot.com/2019/10/review-by-jayne-stanton-of-anatomical.html
http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/reviews/ivory/
https://themagnoliareview.com/tag/the-anatomical-venus/
(SurVision, January 2019)
Maps of the Abandoned City imagines a place deserted by its makers. Mirrors are starved of human life, creatures cut loose and The Dark comes home and takes off its boots.
Order this chapbook directly from me (signed) or via the SurVision website: http://www.survisionmagazine.com/books.htm
Some reviews:
https://londongrip.co.uk/2019/07/london-grip-poetry-review-helen-ivory/
http://everybodysreviewing.blogspot.com/2019/02/review-by-louise-brown-of-maps-of.html
See on Knives Forks and Spoons Press
‘What’s remarkable in these pieces is how much the words are needed. How much the cumulative effect of words is needed. And that there are no howlers, dissonances, or bum notes, among the phrases. The art on show here is often working with both broad sweep (of bold colour) and anatomical fascination as close-up as a mouse having a sniff; at risk in its magical access to a whole level of detail and brutal reality.
The words are needed not to complete, or tidy, the images. They are needed because here is a practitioner who needs to assemble and make visual images, and who needs to set a project in motion that releases messages and tones: it’s not, in other words, about cutting up books in order to say how stupid or arbitrary all language is. No, it’s finding a voice. (Not the voice).
It’s little known that Glen Baxter hung out in the New York poetry scene just as it was going towards L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Baxter was in some ways the nearest the UK had to a person with the popular culture sensibilities, visual sense and ear of suspicion for the well-meaning bourgeois of the late 70s. What Helen Ivory is doing here takes up some of that different place-to-be in Baxter, the drawing in of the art world and of language too cold and too hot to be easily versified; but she is questioning it fresh, and is in some ways making a serious book of poems compared to Baxter’s diverting light verse. They both understand the art of the poetico-visual.’ Ira Lightman
Waiting for Bluebeard tries to understand how a girl could grow up to be the woman living in Bluebeard’s house. The story begins with a part-remembered, part-imagined childhood, where seances are held, and a father drowns in oil beneath the skeleton of his car. When her childhood home coughs up birds in the parlour, the girl enters Bluebeard’s house paying the tariff of a single layer of skin. This is only the first stage of her disappearing, as she searches for a phantom child in a house where Bluebeard haunts the corridors like a sobbing wolf.