Poetry review – CONSTRUCTING A WITCH: Nick Cooke is impressed by Helen Ivory’s energetic and zealously defiant poems
Constructing a Witch
Helen Ivory
Bloodaxe Books
ISBN: 978-1-78037-719-3
90 pp £12.99
Following on from her justly-acclaimed 2019 collection The Anatomical Venus, which focussed on the othering of women in a variety of contexts, this latest offering from Helen Ivory takes more specific aim at one of the sub-themes of its predecessor, that of witchcraft.
The link between the books is emphasised by this book’s preludial quotation from the earlier work, immediately exposing the violent brutality of sexual predation – ‘drive your iron tongue into my mouth’ – and belittling the conquest-obsession that underlies it: ‘think it makes a manful man of you?’, where both the withering scorn and the bilabial alliteration recall Goneril’s taunt to her husband in King Lear, ‘Marry your manhood, mew!’ The self-reference might serve as a warning to some that they should venture upon the forthcoming pages only if they can stomach the upcoming welter of very-much-not-pulled punches. Constructing a Witch is neither for the faint-hearted nor for those minded to seek relativistic excuses for historical abuse of a major, if under-examined kind.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that this volume, Ivory’s sixth with Bloodaxe, is a one-note tirade throughout its ninety pages. It does open, through “The Waking”, with a strident and unashamed crystallisation of the type of woman the speaker/poet feels she is becoming, one ‘who tarries with the devil in the naughty light of day’ – a phrase that again brings Shakespeare to mind, because its use of ‘naughty’ is closer to the Elizabethan sense of ‘harmfully mischievous’ than the far milder contemporary meaning. However, a perfectly calm and reasonable debate-style question at once emerges, one that is central to the book: ‘why must we be occult?’ And although this poem concludes with righteous insistence on the right to behavioural self-determination (‘I hold up those rekindled women and we reel, we howl, we shoot our filthy mouths off’), a wittier aspect to the tone soon emerges, particularly in Ivory’s penchant for deliberate bathos. “Some definitions of Witch”, for instance, ends on a humorously jarring note –
Practitioner of forgotten ways;
Of rituals, sayer of spells.
Barefoot earth listener,
older than God or television.
Still more memorable is the following poem (the Blake-alluding “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”), which re-writes the Eden narrative, recounting how Man ‘in God’s name….created a woman / to bring in his laundry’, and claiming the woman is unfairly blamed for the encounter with Satan, via phrasing reminiscent of Orwell’s ‘more equal than others’: ‘This was the first test and they failed, / though it was decreed that she failed it more.’
Much of the book traces the subsequent history of witchery, whether factual or mythical, with acknowledgment of the likes of John Skelton, Anton Woesnam, and Kramer & Sprenger’s seminal Malleus Maleficarum. A series of poems starkly named after English victims of seventeenth-century purges (Margaret Johnson, Elizabeth Tibbots, Lilias Adie), is followed by a particularly gripping section on perhaps the best-known witch-related event of all, the Salem Trials of 1692. In a standout piece, “Bridget Bishop”, the Eden theme recurs, when the eponymous so-called witch is juxtaposed with her judge, Jonathan Corwin, who seems fixated with the notion of uncontrollability, as if urged to brutal suppression more by the straggly, unwifely wildness of these women than any real fear of their supposed devilry.
He sees her, Judge Corwin, that slatternly Eve,
tittivating her ribbons in the dress shop window.
And all about, uncivilly, walking in streets on the Sabbath –
the Eves; uncovered hair, tattooed naked arms.
Ivory ends that stanza with a dramatic use of style indirecte libre, uncovering Corwin’s thoughts in all their deep-rooted misogynistic savagery, with a neat use of both onomatopoeia (in the repeatedly lashing plosive ‘p’-sounds) and short-vowel internal rhyme voicing his tight-lipped desire for neatly-organised violence: ‘They ought to be stripped and whipped raw.’
Ivory harries Corwin almost as relentlessly as he persecutes Bishop, right to the final lines, where the condemned woman is seen as rather more full of life, and what it’s truly about, than her cold-hearted, control-freak executioner:
If a candle burns blue, she doesn’t see it
so rapt is she in the fire of the living.
He levels his hat against this meddling tempest.
His collar is tight on his neck, these days.
Not all the material is based on the distant past. In addition to acknowledgements of recent academic works such as Dianne Purkiss’ The Witch in History, and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, there’s a name-check for Black Phillip from the 2015 film The Witch, in “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”, while some memorable words from 1996’s The Craft also get a nod, both in a poem’s title (“We are the weirdos, mister”) and the haunting chant with which it climaxes – ‘now is the time, now is the hour, ours is the magic, ours is the power’. Us women must stick together, is one clear message of the book overall – as I feel sure most readers will believe it needs to be – and this chant truly does sound like a positivistic re-casting of the Weird Sisters’ ‘Fair is foul’ refrain, although fittingly the final lines keep the focus on sorority (and solidarity) distinctly modern:
and twenty-seven years later
anonymous, on YouTube’s wall:
I wouldn’t be here without my sisters.
Furthermore, the latter stages of the collection are primarily devoted to a topic only recently and belatedly given its due public attention – the curse of the menopause, and contemporary women’s struggle for control over their bodies, in the face of constant gaslighting. Once again Ivory’s humour and taste for bathos come splendidly to the fore, as exemplified in ‘The Change’:
Every night your hormones throw a party
you don’t want to attend,
messing with the levels like a bad DJ.
“Thirteen Million”, referencing the number of women who were peri- or menopausal in 2022, picks up the ‘o’-word used in the collection’s very first poem, and makes abundantly clear that witching and othering did not die a death in the flames of the Salem burnings:
Yet the doctors, for the most part, shake their heads.
They were not trained for this –
we are just too occult and complex in our workings.
This huge mass of humanity, a third of the UK female population, is both an encumbrance and somehow also invisible:
We are clogging up the whole town now
and other towns for sure.
People climb through us on their way to everywhere.
Fortunately, solidarity survives, as evidenced in “34 Symptoms of the Menopause”, where again the virtual world proves a source of hope and strength. In answer to a mock-comic triple question posted online –
Is it normal to wake up in a bread oven night after night;
to flush blood away like you have emergency stores;
for words to fall from your left hemisphere? –
we are granted a comforting response, albeit one tempered by the hot-flush realities:
And all the women on the internet
faces blazing in the blue light of their screens, say
yes, this is normal
we are here
we can hear you now.
This already pulsating book is further energised by Ivory’s striking collages, which provide the ‘scratchy folk-art feel’ that a post-text note reveals she was aiming for, and are given both context and suggestiveness by scatterings of words, largely taken from sources such as fairytale books and vintage womens’s magazines. Overall, both she and Bloodaxe deserve the highest praise for a collection that is as meticulously produced as it is expertly and unflinchingly composed.
Mar 25 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Helen Ivory
Poetry review – CONSTRUCTING A WITCH: Nick Cooke is impressed by Helen Ivory’s energetic and zealously defiant poems
Following on from her justly-acclaimed 2019 collection The Anatomical Venus, which focussed on the othering of women in a variety of contexts, this latest offering from Helen Ivory takes more specific aim at one of the sub-themes of its predecessor, that of witchcraft.
The link between the books is emphasised by this book’s preludial quotation from the earlier work, immediately exposing the violent brutality of sexual predation – ‘drive your iron tongue into my mouth’ – and belittling the conquest-obsession that underlies it: ‘think it makes a manful man of you?’, where both the withering scorn and the bilabial alliteration recall Goneril’s taunt to her husband in King Lear, ‘Marry your manhood, mew!’ The self-reference might serve as a warning to some that they should venture upon the forthcoming pages only if they can stomach the upcoming welter of very-much-not-pulled punches. Constructing a Witch is neither for the faint-hearted nor for those minded to seek relativistic excuses for historical abuse of a major, if under-examined kind.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that this volume, Ivory’s sixth with Bloodaxe, is a one-note tirade throughout its ninety pages. It does open, through “The Waking”, with a strident and unashamed crystallisation of the type of woman the speaker/poet feels she is becoming, one ‘who tarries with the devil in the naughty light of day’ – a phrase that again brings Shakespeare to mind, because its use of ‘naughty’ is closer to the Elizabethan sense of ‘harmfully mischievous’ than the far milder contemporary meaning. However, a perfectly calm and reasonable debate-style question at once emerges, one that is central to the book: ‘why must we be occult?’ And although this poem concludes with righteous insistence on the right to behavioural self-determination (‘I hold up those rekindled women and we reel, we howl, we shoot our filthy mouths off’), a wittier aspect to the tone soon emerges, particularly in Ivory’s penchant for deliberate bathos. “Some definitions of Witch”, for instance, ends on a humorously jarring note –
Practitioner of forgotten ways; Of rituals, sayer of spells. Barefoot earth listener, older than God or television.Still more memorable is the following poem (the Blake-alluding “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”), which re-writes the Eden narrative, recounting how Man ‘in God’s name….created a woman / to bring in his laundry’, and claiming the woman is unfairly blamed for the encounter with Satan, via phrasing reminiscent of Orwell’s ‘more equal than others’: ‘This was the first test and they failed, / though it was decreed that she failed it more.’
Much of the book traces the subsequent history of witchery, whether factual or mythical, with acknowledgment of the likes of John Skelton, Anton Woesnam, and Kramer & Sprenger’s seminal Malleus Maleficarum. A series of poems starkly named after English victims of seventeenth-century purges (Margaret Johnson, Elizabeth Tibbots, Lilias Adie), is followed by a particularly gripping section on perhaps the best-known witch-related event of all, the Salem Trials of 1692. In a standout piece, “Bridget Bishop”, the Eden theme recurs, when the eponymous so-called witch is juxtaposed with her judge, Jonathan Corwin, who seems fixated with the notion of uncontrollability, as if urged to brutal suppression more by the straggly, unwifely wildness of these women than any real fear of their supposed devilry.
Ivory ends that stanza with a dramatic use of style indirecte libre, uncovering Corwin’s thoughts in all their deep-rooted misogynistic savagery, with a neat use of both onomatopoeia (in the repeatedly lashing plosive ‘p’-sounds) and short-vowel internal rhyme voicing his tight-lipped desire for neatly-organised violence: ‘They ought to be stripped and whipped raw.’
Ivory harries Corwin almost as relentlessly as he persecutes Bishop, right to the final lines, where the condemned woman is seen as rather more full of life, and what it’s truly about, than her cold-hearted, control-freak executioner:
Not all the material is based on the distant past. In addition to acknowledgements of recent academic works such as Dianne Purkiss’ The Witch in History, and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, there’s a name-check for Black Phillip from the 2015 film The Witch, in “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”, while some memorable words from 1996’s The Craft also get a nod, both in a poem’s title (“We are the weirdos, mister”) and the haunting chant with which it climaxes – ‘now is the time, now is the hour, ours is the magic, ours is the power’. Us women must stick together, is one clear message of the book overall – as I feel sure most readers will believe it needs to be – and this chant truly does sound like a positivistic re-casting of the Weird Sisters’ ‘Fair is foul’ refrain, although fittingly the final lines keep the focus on sorority (and solidarity) distinctly modern:
Furthermore, the latter stages of the collection are primarily devoted to a topic only recently and belatedly given its due public attention – the curse of the menopause, and contemporary women’s struggle for control over their bodies, in the face of constant gaslighting. Once again Ivory’s humour and taste for bathos come splendidly to the fore, as exemplified in ‘The Change’:
“Thirteen Million”, referencing the number of women who were peri- or menopausal in 2022, picks up the ‘o’-word used in the collection’s very first poem, and makes abundantly clear that witching and othering did not die a death in the flames of the Salem burnings:
This huge mass of humanity, a third of the UK female population, is both an encumbrance and somehow also invisible:
Fortunately, solidarity survives, as evidenced in “34 Symptoms of the Menopause”, where again the virtual world proves a source of hope and strength. In answer to a mock-comic triple question posted online –
we are granted a comforting response, albeit one tempered by the hot-flush realities:
This already pulsating book is further energised by Ivory’s striking collages, which provide the ‘scratchy folk-art feel’ that a post-text note reveals she was aiming for, and are given both context and suggestiveness by scatterings of words, largely taken from sources such as fairytale books and vintage womens’s magazines. Overall, both she and Bloodaxe deserve the highest praise for a collection that is as meticulously produced as it is expertly and unflinchingly composed.