I’m a huge fan of Helen Ivory’s work. Both a visual artist and poet, her language paints luminous word-pictures and IMHO, her latest collection is one of her very best. I urge anyone interested in poetry to read Helen’s work. Her voice is highly original, with striking imagery and language.
I think that she’s one of the U.K. best. (Scroll down for my review)

Her artwork won an award for best cover.

See Helen’s website here: http://www.helenivory.co.uk/

Helen also edits the renowned poetry zine ‘Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry and Prose Webzine’ with publisher Kate Birch. You can read and submit here: http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/

See mine and other reviews and purchase Helen’s book here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R121KSKDASEJ2M/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1780374690

Amazon Customer Review by Kathryn Alderman

K. M. Alderman5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful, a ‘must-read’.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 November 2019Format: Paperback

Helen Ivory’s parlour doll on the cover of The Anatomical Venus (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), echoes what’s within. The collaged, angel-winged beauty, be-skirted in a dead wedding bouquet, will be ‘served up’ as morsels of her othering in her many incarnations. She is a wanton sex-siren, witch, feeble-headed ‘slattern’ or unclean invalid – at once, Coventry Patmore’s housebound Angel (1854) and Kramer’s witch (1487) and all states between.

Through referencing numerous written sources and historical events, Ivory offers a pinpoint analysis of the received wisdom about women. For example, she cites nineteenth century asylum records and Freud in ‘Female Casebook 6’ (p.26) and ‘Housewife Psychosis’ (p.18) and references Shakespeare’s Ophelia (p.48) amongst a host of feminine constructs.

Through masterful language and imagery, Ivory conjures a collage of stories and voices, or the voiceless ventriloquized. In ‘Stillborn’ (37)

‘a half-made girl
with a secret interred in her womb’

whose grief at loosing her ‘unborn’ is voiced only through her disturbed behaviours in St. Andrew’s Asylum. Or Venus morphs into a

‘blood and earth caked’

wise woman in ‘Cunning’ (23). She guides women through to birth with ancient wisdom foraged from hedgerow pantries, whilst the physician who ‘invents’ himself in the ‘empirical light of day’ will ‘rip off [your daughter’s] head with forceps’.

Venus is confined under the weight of societal dictates, where even the voice of God pronounces her wanton nature in for example in ‘The Kept House’ (12). However, Ivory’s humour often gilds the burden with satirical observation:

‘When the Lord spoke unto her
He had already taken up residence
inside her house
and had much reduced her larder’ (34).

The Anatomical Venus of the title was an Eighteen Century phenomenon. These were wax forms of reclining female nudes, beauties with real hair and pearls, whose torsos could be removed for the male gaze to examine the internal organs, as though with some museum exhibit. Helen Ivory’s portraits weave an overview of women’s ‘othering’, of the entrenched ways in which the feminine principle has been and is subjugated and abused. It is masterful, a ‘must-read’ for all.