Helen Ivory

One Such Tale


After a vast night of walking,
the shadow happened upon the tor
and arranged herself nicely
among the high-grazing sheep.

She knew she wasn’t a sheep
but the sheep did not craze –
none lifted their heads
from the sky sweet grass.

She yearned in her heart to be given a name
to be called for, to have bearings
so when the shepherd appeared
the shadow cleared her throat.

What am I? She implored, in a voice
she thought kind as a rockpool.
Oh, but the shepherd was sapling of spirit
and he ran and he ran, screaming pestilence

and thence flew about the village
recounting a starless fairy
that turned his blood to winter
and ripped at his manhood with her claws.


*


Day’s Conversation with Night


The sun was glory on the tip of my tongue
and every creeping thing and flying thing
cast the rays of its eyes all about. Do you remember?
Nothing was occult, lambs cut capers
and no brute’s maw closed on any throat.
Life was lustre, unbruised fruit
till you dragged your dogs across the sky
and in your wake, a plaguey mess.

The Dark wrapped the earth in ragged clouds
and began to croon a death song for Day –
summoning it to its own remembering:

When you were a cub, on that first day
you invented a theatre of charcoaled timbers
and drew back the curtains, quiet as an owl.
The lanterns cast a low wash of blue
and your imagination stalked in from the wings.
Do you recall how those long winter nights
felt in your hands as you knitted them
into a pall you named Dark from your seat in the gods?

Monsters – some slithered, some crept from my folds
in a bristling derangement of nature
while downstage beldams held to a seething crucible
their faces awake with a terrible light.
I am thunderstruck you cannot summon this.
How you painted fear so vividly inside the heads of men!
Day, you have clammed up since that early grandiosity.
I’ve grown too old to close the curtains on this all.


*


Fetish to Counteract Witchcraft


It is supposed that hearts of beasts
are infused with the spirits of their prey;
that breath breathed upon their prey
and back into the heart
is charged with powerful magic.
 
That such beasts overwhelm their quarry
demonstrates their sovereignty.
There is further evidence these powers are preserved
when the heart is cut from the body
and the body putrefies into the ground.

If witchcraft is suspected in your flock,
if it is seized by foot-rot, the fluke or bottle-jaw
and sheep are dying in the fields,
fiercely stick the heart with thorns and nails
while fixating on the malady astir.

Thus, the attendant witch will be revealed.
Watch close for any lowly hag
evincing untoward disorders.
Act swift now, like a bird of Jove
closing down its prey.


*


The Change


You sit inside yourself
and your body does its thing.
One minute it’s a honeypot of oestrogen
the next, the head you had grown up with
is a crucible – and the words flushes and flashes
don’t touch the sides of this urge
to run clear of this chassis.

The clothes in your wardrobe
carry a whisper of mutton
from a source buried deep inside language.
You smear Lady Danger on muttony chops
and everywhere advice on how to hide your arms –
heaven forfend you make a spectacle
of your collagen depletion.

Every night your hormones throw a party
you don’t want to attend,
messing with the levels like a bad DJ.
You read that tinnitus is affected by oestrogen’s jitterbug;
that not enough research has been done.
Your skin is a rubber doll plumped up with lava
that’s stumbled into a cold store at 4am.



 

    12     {By the slant of her tone}
    13     The Waking
    14     Some definitions of Witch
    16     The lust of the goat is the bounty of God
    17     Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast
    18     Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
    19     Another Story
    20     We are the weirdos mister
    21     {daughters of air}
    22     The Answer
    23     Only Bad Witches Are Ugly
    24     The Woman of Endor to Saul
    25     Night Hag
    26     One Such Tale
    27     Scry
    28     Day’s Conversation with Night
    29     More thoughts about the dark
    30     The Antihousewife
    31     Dairying
    32     {gnats, swarm upon swarm}
    33     Remedy
    34     How to Construct an Ale Witch
    35     New Rules for the Disenchanted Land
    36     Cackle
    37     The Gift
    38     Fetish to Counteract Witchcraft
    39     {and thus the riddle has been read}
    40     The Moon’s Halo
    41     Protection Ink
    42     At the Witchcraft Museum
    43     Hexentanz
    44     Häxan
    45     The Original Bad Girl
    46     To a Painter
    47     All about the hair
    48     More thoughts about the body
    49     {a cluster of pretty berries}
    50     Margaret Johnson
    51     Elizabeth Tibbots
    52     Lilias Adie (c. 1640-1704)
    53     Walking the Witch
    54     The Devil’s Mark
    55     More thoughts about the Witch Finder
    56     {Shall the boys come and hang, burn or roast you?}
    57     Pendle Tourist
    58     Bridget Bishop
    59     The Good People of Salem
    60     Samuel Parris Dreams of Dogs
    61     The Makings
    62     Witchfinder Tour
    63     Mistley Pond Washes its Hands
    65     {familiar spirits]
    66     More thoughts about the moon
    67     Prick
    68     Resistance Spells
    68         Spell to Take Back the Night
    69         Summoning Spell: The Body
    70         Disarming Spell: The Enchanter
    71     {The church-bells began to ring}
    72     ‘Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen’
    73     The Watcher
    74     The Happenings
    77     Hang the Moon
    78     The Menstruous Woman
    79     Brain Fog
    80     The Change
    81     ‘Invidia’ (‘Envy’)
    82     {shortly after midnight}
    83     Tick-Tock
    84     Thirteen Million
    85     This whole thing was nearly never a thing
    86     34 Symptoms of the Menopause
    88     Votive
    89     ‘The Spirit of the Storm’
    90     {fire as fire}

    93     Acknowledgements
    95     About the collage/poems
 

Reviews of Helen Ivory's The Anatomical Venus:

‘The Anatomical Venus is an often disturbing journey of how women have been treated by men through the ages. It is historical reportage. It is controlled and focused anger without sentiment. It is subjugation and oppression laid bare in subtle and often mesmerising ways. It is Angela Carter’s eye meets Elaine Showalter’s brain. It is dark, upsetting and erotic. And it’s laced with magic from the first page until the last. It’s the suffering of women, and women fighting back in delicious and unusual ways. It says as much, if not more, about men throughout history as it does about women.  Read this book. Then read it again. And again. With each reading, The Anatomical Venus will reveal something new, like all great books do.’ – Mark Connors, Northern Soul

‘Historical it may well be but this collection’s contemporary relevance is searing… This collection is a stunningly curated linguistic exhibition on the historical abuse of women. Enticing and yet flinching, this disquieting house of dolls makes abuse seen and urges us to reevaluate why women are where they are now, and it does so with an eerie and unforgettable beauty.’ – Rachel Smart, Storgy Magazine

'If Waiting for Bluebeard was the collection that not only delivered on the promise of Ivory’s earlier titles but announced itself as a defiant treatise on what it means to be a survivor, then The Anatomical Venus – populated by women who refuse to be tamed, instructed or fit neatly into categories – is a clarion call for the fight back.' – Neil Fulwood, The High Window

‘This is a collection to browse, to devour, to return to. Unless you have a strong stomach for nightmares, it is not bedtime reading. Maybe it is best read in daylight, beside an open window so the ghosts and horrors can escape. Every library, wunderkammer and bookshelf needs a copy of this book.’ – Hannah Stone, The Lake

'The poems deal with women treated as curiosities of various kinds, from the anatomical Venus of the title... to witches, dolls, asylum inmates and even a sex robot... It's an excellent idea, both a history of different sorts of objectification and a mirror of mens' attempts to catalogue what they identify as aberrant, and it works beautifully... an absorbing, intriguing collection.' – Frank Startup, The School Librarian

‘This collection is a rich exploration of the vast difference between men and women at a time when gender definition is becoming blurred and contentious…These poems, at times using archaic language and referencing fixed misconceptions, form a sort of Wunderkammer of precious specimens for us to gaze upon in amazement. As with any cabinet of curiosities, the contents are both beautiful and intriguing, shocking and bizarre, but most of all a reminder of attitudes and practices which should stay in the past.’ – Pat Edwards, London Grip

'...Ivory not only calls attention to the historical practices that have been used to subjugate women, she also reminds us of the process of double-vision: here is an entire collection written in an ironic double-vision, a female writing the female through the male historical gaze. The result is nothing less than what Shuttle describes as “a strong explosion in the sky.” – Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, The North

‘Sometimes a poem, a book, a voice speaks to you, makes you sit up. The Anatomical Venus does that for me, to me, no question… This is a passionately felt collection that quietly seethes with righteous anger and pity, at the world of women who have too often found their only protest in hurting themselves; the ones who resisted, burned or drowned as witches, force-fed as suffragettes, or diagnosed as mad, and treated accordingly. By men.’ – John Foggin, The Great Fogginzo’s Cobweb