Helen Ivory

- United Kingdom -

Helen Ivory was born in Luton, England and now lives in Norwich in an old Butcher’s shop. She is a poet and also a visual artist who makes word and image collages and shadowboxes from found images and old cut-up books and ephemera.

In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets. Moniza Alvi, Cholmondeley Award co-judge of the award writes: 'Helen Ivory, a highly individualistic poet and visual artist, conjures a world that is both magical and sharply real. As in freshly conceived fairy tales, everything is transmutable. She expresses the intrinsic strangenesses of life, and makes a brilliant contribution to female empowerment through poems that are disturbing, agile, and visually telling.'

Constructing a Witch (October 2024) her sixth collection with Bloodaxe Books, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Jo Clement, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin 2024 writes: 'Constructing a Witch is spellbinding. [...] No word is wasted here as Ivory persuasively assembles the subversive history of the woman-as-witch. [...] This impressive collection tackles the fear and denigration of ageing women whilst advocating for a womanhood that is as "mutable as the day is long" ('More thoughts about the body').' In summer 2025 Constructing a Witch was translated into Greek by Nikolas Koutsodontis and Katerina Iliopoulou and published in Greece by Thraka.

Her chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City (2019) was published by the surrealist press, SurVision in Ireland. The Street of the Clockmaker, a poem from Maps of the Abandoned City is one of the Poems on the (London) Underground.

Her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US in 2023. Robert Archambeau writes in his Introduction “Ivory is an intensely visual poet, and her images could nestle up close to those of artists like Leonora Carrington, say, or Dorothea Tanning: Surrealist painters whose strongest work gives us domestic interiors where the realistic takes the impossible in uncanny matrimony.

“And then … there is Woman, in archetypal form, standing at the center of Ivory’s work. Ivory introduces us to women who disappear in bad marriages; women who are in various ways fed on and consumed; women shut into houses, sometimes for many years; women who parade in new dresses in front of men they should not trust; women silenced in scold’s bridles; needlewomen; cooks; laundresses. But she also brings us into the presence of sorceresses, witches, communers with an ethereal other side—Baba Yagas before whom one trembles.”

Helen Ivory edits the webzine Ink Sweat & Tears and teaches and mentors for The Poetry School, Arvon and The National Centre for Writing Academy.

Reviews of Constructing a Witch

Constructing a Witch is a blazingly angry book, but the word that came to me on a first reading was ‘playful’. This does not mean by any means that it is a frivolous or light-hearted one – the pace and tone keep the book from feeling like a manifesto or a rant but take nothing from its impact.’ – Elizabeth Rimmer, Glasgow Review of Books

'Constructing a Witch is a thorough meditation on the demonization of women, or at least their subjugation, even in western culture, and the peculiarities of the female body – the onset of menses, the effects of menopause – that are so often taboo subjects, a fact which contributes to the “othering” of women. [...] Ivory’s research is impressive, impeccable. [...] Constructing a Witch is witty, charming, informative, and a cri de Coeur.' – Charles Rammelkamp, The Lake

'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.' – Poppy Kleiser, PN Review

More about the poet

Poetry

The Waking /

I have become one of those women who goes about with a rattan carriage, salvaging women buried at crossroads or planted out in the woods. One of those women who reconstructs bodies, replacing ligaments with wire. The kind who mixes her own blood with the earth to bring swell to their bones. The kind of woman who tarries with the devil in the naughty light of day – why must we be occult? I hold up those rekindled women and we reel, we howl, and we shoot our filthy mouths off.
Some definitions of Witch /

Carcass of rags
the dead-rat stink of old milk.
A beyond the pale beggar,
runt of the litter.

*
Gleaner of herbs
hallower of the compass.
Cunning hedge rider,
measurer of fire.

*

Midwife of shadows
low vixen with blood on its maw.
Deliverer of silence
to the henhouse.

*

Lighter than a bible,
priestly ink is gravity
beneath her flying feet.
Her body writes into the sky.

*

Blended with the earth
she wears a moss cloak.
Some procure her remedies.
She is a scapegoat for bad luck.

*

A childless wraith
in a child’s picture book.
The worst mother
man ever invented.

*

The method of kettling
troublesome women.
A peck of black pepper
in the milk-and-water blether.

*

Practitioner of forgotten ways;
of rituals, sayer of spells.
Barefoot earth-listener,
older than God or television.
The Answer /

It was a wonder no one noticed when they cut the woman in half. Not from side to side, as they do in workaday cabaret acts, but straight down the middle. A perfect bisection. Making use of the smoke and mirrors left behind by the illusionist, she appeared, both of her, to walk away on two legs to two different locations.
One went home to her family and scrubbed down the hearthstones. The other stole deep into the woods and was presently joined by a cat with a murderous yowl.
When her stepchildren arrived quarrelsome, too late for dinner, stomping their muddy hoofs all through the house, she sent them out to the woods. Let her deal with them there, she thought. She stood in front of the mirror, smiling as crookedly as a good woman is able.
The Moon’s Halo /

Rain has been quarrelsome the whole night long and raps at the door to come in. Rain is the sky’s voice, the moon’s halo. Rain is bedlam on the stone body of the house, spiders have forsaken their meticulous webs. Rain is the marriage of toads. A tatty jackdaw cleaves to ridge tiles combing weather from its wings. You invert a pan in the yard to appeal to rain’s kinder nature. In some kitchen a shadow ties nine knots in a length of frayed string, for this cat-and-dog flood. Step out in rain on the day of a funeral and god’s tears will drown you the rest of your life.
The Devil’s Mark /

I am naked in the rawest sense.
Clothes, then hair –
even in the most private of places –
ripped sore with a dirty blade.

This is their enquiry,
a science in God’s name.
A proof of how Satan raked an owner’s claw
across the parchment of my skin.

Nature marked me out, they said
Showed the dark one I was open for trade.
A blood red freckle here,
a stain the cast of a skull, on my behind.

If they cut into my heart
they would find a crucifix inverted
and my faithless womb would harbour a demon.
These were the facts of it.

They say it was the Devil had me
yet I sharp recall the human meat of man
and his beery breath up close.
The Devil wore a poacher’s coat.
More Thoughts about the Dark /

If you take the dark for a walk across the ordinary light of this page, it will cover its eyes. It will grovel down inside its fur and beg to be taken to a time before language. The dark elects for inchoate echoes where the imagination scratches pictures inside the hippocampus with its imaginary claw. The dark is not a nice man. The dark strenuously objects to honey owing to its close connection with the sun. When you open your mouth, you pour into the dark. When the dark opens its mouth, it pours into you. Have a care for the dark.
Resistance Spells /

Spell to Take Back the Night

As a fox, then. A rust blade
through the beer belly of midnight;
that’s how it goes.

Take to your workbench
crack the nitrogen bubbles in your knuckles,
gather your fibres and needles.

Do it now, as the sun crosses the street
all hands in its pockets;
all devil-may-care.

The barbs of your needle
stabbed into the fibres
will ravel them in on themselves.

When your hide is complete
and you are fixed safe inside
then you shall go to the ball.

Summoning Spell: The Body

Call back blood to blood.
Call back the spectacle of flesh.
Fasten on your head with wire,
hold it like a scrying ball
in your savvy hands.

You will see now, clear as clear
the acid burns, the lotus feet,
the force-fed and the skinnied-down.
Your face floats just below
the surface of the glass.

Midwife your very body home
from every shabby playboy den
and launder up the air with smudging sage.
Call back the spectacle of flesh.
Call back blood to blood.

Disarming Spell: The Enchanter

This is a lesson in forgetting;
unpicking yourself
from the love song he constructed
which you ruined for him
with your clumsy ways.

This is when you stop saying sorry;
when you decide what shoes to wear.
Trace a circle around yourself;
use the wingspan of your arms
to gather all the sky you need.

From this leeway you will behold
the woman who trod warily
about her daily chores;
the one who bit her tongue so much
her words were rendered void.

If you desire it, tromp barefoot -
the critic spitting résumés
on how you have performed each day
has melted clean away.

This is furthermore
a lesson in self-conjuring.

Note: The United Nations defines violence against women as: any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.
The Menstruous Woman /

. . . bees, it is a well-known fact, will forsake their hives
if touched by a menstruous woman.
Plinny The Elder The Natural History.

It is never elegant to speak of blood.
A female body, tricked and out of whack
adjusts to wearing kindly black
to shroud the purpling of her clothes,
as menstrual fluid falls from her
too pell-mell for any shop-bought rags.

Not everyone is bold enough
to turn their menses into art;
to scriven gore across primed cotton board.
Some zigzag a passage through this cursed spell
with all the euphemisms
their red aunt instilled in them.

They are unreliable; leave work early –
say, twenty years too soon.
They become a woman of a certain age.
Who needs the foul embarrassment
of ageing female bodies in a public place?
Who really wants to be deprived of all that honey?
More thoughts about the body /

If you take her to the sea she will kick like a fish. When the moon pulls her from her cave, she writes it a postcard with her own blood. She looks nothing like, everything like the paintings that have been made about her. She is mutable as the day is long. If you tie a bell to her ankle, she will stuff it with moss. Lately she has attempted to cast off flesh. She has been observed dropping it off at Lost Property in a neat leather bag. She has been seen on a Greek mountain balancing her head upon the tip of a finger.
Tick-Tock /

All your life you’ve been expecting her to come rapping at your door.   Let me in let me in, she pushes at the tender fabric of the shelter you’d assembled with your bare hands.
            Don’t you remember how they warned you about the woods? The woods are a darkly place, where you’ll meet your darkly self and further ghastly things. Why did you go, why did you take your pretty light there? Why did you wear the woebegone smock of the crone when you could have been spring-step in a bright yellow dress?
            And now she’s in your bath, skin draping from her bones. And now she’s taking off her wedding ring, sliding it onto your finger with a gob of her spit.
Spirit of the Storm /

Frederick Sandys study for wood engraving 1860

There comes a point in very woman’s life
when she transmutes into The Spirit of the Storm.
Why not grow snakes for hair,
conjure rain and lightning from your artful hands?

You’ve earnt this wrath, don’t squander it
on slapdash chores and sundry empty tasks
in the hollow of your living room -
get out and find a fitting auditorium.

They’ve been opining it for years
it should come as no surprise
when venom spouts forth from your breasts.
Lo! you are supreme, the most debauched of all bad mothers!

Helen Ivory

- United Kingdom -

Poetry

The Waking /

Some definitions of Witch /

The Answer /

The Moon’s Halo /

The Devil’s Mark /

More Thoughts about the Dark /

Resistance Spells /

The Menstruous Woman /

More thoughts about the body /

Tick-Tock /

Spirit of the Storm /