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The Anatomical Venus
An 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.
- GenresPoetryPhilosophy
67 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 23, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 30, 2019
I have long been a fan of Helen Ivory - her poems have a blend of magical realism and grittiness which I love. This book feels different and fresh. Exploring the ways that women throughout history have been both 'demonised' and silenced - one thing often leading to the other. Ivory has clearly done a lot of research but the resulting poems do not feel like a research project. They are vital and alive and while they often speak of historical things - Scolds Bridle, Witchcraft, The Fainting Room etc. You can't help but transpose what they saying (as the poet does very cleverly) onto what is going on in modern society. I learnt some historical stuff from this collection but most importantly I came away inspired and invigorated. This feels like an important book. I am still thinking about it weeks after I finished it.
July 19, 2019
The Anatomical Venus by Helen Ivory. Bloodaxe Books, 2019. 64 pages. $9.95, paperback.
Gentlemen, the Venerina is a dissectible young woman
presented voluptuously in her final moments.
from The Little Venus
In the forty-eight poems that comprise Helen Ivory’s latest collection, she herself dissects society’s attitudes to women over the past 500-odd years, from the dark days of puritans and witches to our own (supposedly) enlightened era of AI and ex machina porn. The Anatomical Venus literally refers to an 18th Century wax effigy of an idealised woman, to be examined and deconstructed by (typically male) medical students, but also provides a neat metaphor for every doll, real or figurative, that has ever found itself marginalized, manipulated and misunderstood – or else confined to the eponymous house, in which
A woman lies so tidily
below the belly of her cooking range,
but
A child presses fingers to a pattern of blood
on the candy-stripe wallpaper,
traces the outline of the pink blanket
draped over the edge of the cot
while her mother explains
that something bad has happened
in the dolls’ house.
from The Dolls’ House Mysteries
Helen Ivory is a feminist, an intellectual, an historian and (very nearly) a scientist, and yet above all she is an artist, not a polemicist, a poet, not a politician, and subject matter that might, in clumsier hands, have become mere manifesto is transformed into gorgeous riffs on a multifaceted theme where
The rattle of clockwork
fell about her feet
as faces blazed down
from every high place they’d been hiding.
And the vesper, that evening star, rang out.
from Chair
In The Anatomical Venus you will find wit and compassion, intelligence and research, realism and surrealism, allusion and illusion, history and myth. But most importantly, you will gain access to a carefully constructed work of poetry that quite simply needs to be read –
In the third dream
I am shining the silver
of every smoke-tainted
coffeehouse in Vienna.
Spoons queue up –
clever schoolboys
on the first day of term –
I polish their faces.
All of the girl-children
are folded lace parasols
packed up in a casket
at the back of the nursery.
from Housewife Psychosis
In short, this is a wonderful (in the original sense of the word) collection, a literary wunderkammer, a work of serious intent and deft achievement that deserves an essay, not a review. The essays, I am sure, will be forthcoming. In the meantime, let this review suffice.
—Michael Paul Hogan
Gentlemen, the Venerina is a dissectible young woman
presented voluptuously in her final moments.
from The Little Venus
In the forty-eight poems that comprise Helen Ivory’s latest collection, she herself dissects society’s attitudes to women over the past 500-odd years, from the dark days of puritans and witches to our own (supposedly) enlightened era of AI and ex machina porn. The Anatomical Venus literally refers to an 18th Century wax effigy of an idealised woman, to be examined and deconstructed by (typically male) medical students, but also provides a neat metaphor for every doll, real or figurative, that has ever found itself marginalized, manipulated and misunderstood – or else confined to the eponymous house, in which
A woman lies so tidily
below the belly of her cooking range,
but
A child presses fingers to a pattern of blood
on the candy-stripe wallpaper,
traces the outline of the pink blanket
draped over the edge of the cot
while her mother explains
that something bad has happened
in the dolls’ house.
from The Dolls’ House Mysteries
Helen Ivory is a feminist, an intellectual, an historian and (very nearly) a scientist, and yet above all she is an artist, not a polemicist, a poet, not a politician, and subject matter that might, in clumsier hands, have become mere manifesto is transformed into gorgeous riffs on a multifaceted theme where
The rattle of clockwork
fell about her feet
as faces blazed down
from every high place they’d been hiding.
And the vesper, that evening star, rang out.
from Chair
In The Anatomical Venus you will find wit and compassion, intelligence and research, realism and surrealism, allusion and illusion, history and myth. But most importantly, you will gain access to a carefully constructed work of poetry that quite simply needs to be read –
In the third dream
I am shining the silver
of every smoke-tainted
coffeehouse in Vienna.
Spoons queue up –
clever schoolboys
on the first day of term –
I polish their faces.
All of the girl-children
are folded lace parasols
packed up in a casket
at the back of the nursery.
from Housewife Psychosis
In short, this is a wonderful (in the original sense of the word) collection, a literary wunderkammer, a work of serious intent and deft achievement that deserves an essay, not a review. The essays, I am sure, will be forthcoming. In the meantime, let this review suffice.
—Michael Paul Hogan
April 3, 2020
Let me start by saying that this took me along time to get to grips with being able to review this because I thought it a dishonour to not by reviewed by a woman.
It’s not a book you can just pick up and dip into, you’ll have to devour every morsel and suck the marrow out. This is a truly female radical punch in the gut, for among the wolves are corseted fawns dripping arsenic into the delicate tea cups of piping Earl Grey of those who’ll blow their houses down.
The short review is it’s if Robert Eggers were a woman and wrote down The Witch, but that’s to simplistic. It is at once forbidding, terrifying for the woman
with economic no syllable is superfluous. Thee collection is an anthem for those forlorn at heart, exposing the false honour of those Victorian skin freaks.
It’s not a book you can just pick up and dip into, you’ll have to devour every morsel and suck the marrow out. This is a truly female radical punch in the gut, for among the wolves are corseted fawns dripping arsenic into the delicate tea cups of piping Earl Grey of those who’ll blow their houses down.
The short review is it’s if Robert Eggers were a woman and wrote down The Witch, but that’s to simplistic. It is at once forbidding, terrifying for the woman
with economic no syllable is superfluous. Thee collection is an anthem for those forlorn at heart, exposing the false honour of those Victorian skin freaks.
Read
February 13, 2020I was a little wary of this collection... would it be too ranty, would it be too gruesome, would it be overfilled with arcane cultural references? No, not really, and partly by dint of Helen Ivory's wide range over her theme: dunked witches and scold's bridles but also the thoughts of an AI, corsets and the mother of 'Freud's' Dora. Yes, there's plenty to go a-Googlin' over later but the poems can be enjoyed and appreciated without.
October 8, 2019
A fascinating, beautiful, surreal and unsettling exploration of the othering of women. Highly recommended!
January 12, 2025
In this slim volume Helen Ivory reminds us how poems can also be spells and incantations. Such an exciting reading session.
Favourites: All The Suckling Imps, The Boatman's Wife, Besom.
Favourites: All The Suckling Imps, The Boatman's Wife, Besom.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews