Description
Book SynopsisAn 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.
Trade ReviewHelen Ivory creates a troubled yet beguiling world rich in irony and disquiet. She possesses a strongly-grounded narrative voice which, combined with her dextrous transformative takes both on reality and on what lies beyond reality’s surface, puts one in mind of the darker side of Stevie Smith who said that poetry 's a strong explosion in the sky'. -- Penelope Shuttle
A direct approach, via deep folklore and dream imagery, to the conundrum of being a woman…in keeping with what I think we mean when we say 'women’s writing'. This book is mischievously dark, rich with anti-logic and harnessed to the power of something we used to call magic. -- Katy Evans-Bush * on Waiting for Bluebeard *
She is a visually precise poet, with the gift of creating stunning images with an economy of means…Ivory has established an eerily engaging style. Her poems are like mobiles suspended on invisible threads, charming to watch as they seem to spin by themselves in the air, but capable of administering more than a paper cut on the sensibility of the reader. -- James Sutherland-Smith
Table of Contents9 Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Sorceress to Live 10 All the Suckling Imps 12 The Kept House 13 Curse 14 Wunderkammer with Weighing Scales and Hospital Bed 15 Beggar Dark 16 Wunderkammer with Black Coffee and Ghost Moth 17 Wunderkammer with Escher Stairs and Cheshire Cat 18 Housewife Psychosis 20 The Fainting Room 22 The Little Venus 23 Cunning 24 Dissecting Venus 25 Stripped 26 Baba Yaga No Longer Reads the News 27 Poppet 28 By Water 29 Female Casebook 6 30 Chair 31 The Parlour Maid 32 Labourer’s Wife 33 The Elevation 34 Walking Backwards 35 Falling 36 Farmer’s Wife 37 Stillborn 38 The Boatman’s Wife 39 The Housekeeper 40 Wunderkammer with Needle Girl and Tool Kit 41 The Dolls’ House Mysteries 43 Doll Hospital at the Top of the Hill 44 Wunderkammer with St Dymphna Tea Towel 45 The Reformed Woman 46 Wunderkammer with Homestead and Aeolian Harp 47 Ordeal by Water 48 Wunderkammer with Ophelia and Hospital Bath 49 Wunderkammer with Glass Plate Photograph 50 Besom 51 Selling the Wind 52 The Hanged Woman Addresses The Reverend Heinrich Kramer 53 Bitch 54 Scold’s Bridle 55 Hellish Nell 56 Six Signs You Might Be a Slattern 57 The Goddess Gets Her Close-Up 58 Pygmalion 59 Anger in Ladies &c 60 Vessel 63 Notes
