The Breakfast Machine

by Helen Ivory

Inside "The Breakfast Machine" a chicken on squeaky tin legs is cooking you eggs and a squirrel plays tape-recorded birdsong high up in a tree. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse high-tail it into town as cowboys, and the fate of the world is decided by a game of cards. "The Breakfast Machine" is driven by the transformations of fairytale where the dark corners of childhood are explored and found to be alive and well in offices, kitchens and hen-houses. There is more than a hint of East European darkness in Helen Ivory's third collection, which sits more comfortably alongside the animations of Jan Svankmajer than any English poetic tradition.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2010

Reviews

[W · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. Delightfully strange, tragic, and unique. I would definitely recommend this to any fans of Alice in Wonderland.

[Phillip Goodman]

30 pages in and this is already one of the best collections i have ever red, the imagery is utterly bizarre, in an extremely dark dreamlike way, but leaving room for some strange sort of almost anti-wackiness which is very refreshing, this is art poetry for the jaded....possibly, it is also very literate, and more than a collection, it feels extremely like a complete work, one poem, though different from the previous one, follows on from it, picking up something thematic or linguistic and running with it, though not for long, the poems are brilliantly terse, but never too short, always just right.
62 pages in and in fact finished and i realize that the cover image is very interestingly descriptive of the work inside, it is work that need to be set to visuals and to music, it is in many ways incredibly musical and most certainly visual poetry, the cover image doesn't just pic out images from the poems, it goes further, seeming almost to describe their souls, and why not, though the author (Helen Ivory, quite a visually interesting name in itself) did not create the images, she has studied painting and photography and this shows in her work, her poetry is a visual medium, which your mind paints with.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

4.5*

All of the poems place you in a world that is confusing yet recognisable. They leave you feeling like you have just stepped out of a dream - you sort of know what happened, but you couldn't explain it to someone else. Like a fairytale, there are dark moments scattered with enough light that you still want to exist there. Beautiful.

[Chrissie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing..

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dolls and mice soundly beat the drum in this entertaining collection

[David Chang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, lyrical and beautiful.
Her poems stay with you and draw you back

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

the poems are mostly very static sketches of moments in time,they are very atmospheric and some of the imagery is unsettling and gorgeous in equal measure.