Helen Ivory, "Constructing a Witch"

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches for Arvon and the National Centre for Writing Academy. She has published six collections with Bloodaxe Books. The most recent, Constructing a Witch, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (2024). Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A poem from her chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City (SurVision 2019 ) was selected as Poem on the Underground, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat in the US in 2023. Her work has been translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets. 

About Constructing a Witch, by Helen Ivory
Despite the Devil being conceived to direct human baseness away from our goodly selves, there has always been sin in the world. The Bible has it that woman is the weaker vessel, therefore her inferior ways could easily let the Devil into the house, and into her oh so corruptible body – and thus the story begins.  

Helen Ivory’s sixth collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. The witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.

These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems of Constructing a Witch Helen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries.

You can read more about Constructing a Witch on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Constructing a Witch

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 Gift

There once was a lonely woman who replaced her heart with an apple. She took a sharp knife and engraved her name in its freshly shined skin, and those of the names of these spirits: Cosmer, Synady, Heupide. She stood in the middle of a bridge as the wind heaped bright dying leaves about. She balanced the apple in the palm of her hand, but nobody came for her love. And the earth moved through the seasons, and still nobody came. This carried on till the apple resembled some devil they say, and the woman herself had transmuted to dust.

One day a quiet pandemonium emanated from the apple and the townspeople hid behind themselves, too cowed to approach. A man stepped from the crowd with the air of a judge. He decreed that indeed, the apple was infested with foul spirits, and pitched it into the river with his long-legged boot.