"The Breakfast Machine" by Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe, 2010)

12

14

21

23

33

37

38

39

40

42

45

49

window

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mirror

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house

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wall

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room

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sky

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night

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moon

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mice

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bird

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She re-uses many of her symbols - "cellar"/"basement', "door", "rain", "clock" etc. "window", "night", rooms, birds and "sky" each get over 9 mentions. Here's a table of the concepts and page-numbers that cluster the most. It seems from this table that the poem on p.14 ("Sleep") re-uses many of the common images, though that doesn't make it boring. In it a house is anthropomorphised (an idea that haunts many of the poems). Then a woman inside it sleepwalks to a mirror, and sees a bird's skull on the windowsill. Later, in "Mouse trap" (p.37), there are mice in a house without walls, a carefully constructed trap, inside and outside confused again - "We are mice here, scuttling through/ dark corridors in each other's heads".

If people figure in poems at all, their only company is the narrational voice. The most common theme is "Things aren't what they seem". Here are beginning and ending of "Jumble Sale"

Toys are lost from their boxes and upside down, jigsaw puzzles will not make sense ... Over in bric-à-brac, a doll with no eyes watches from behind kitchen scales.

Some poems are more dream-surreal. "You asked what I was afraid of" ends with

From the far hills, an ant writ large brings its silhouette closer to reveal you as an unsaddled rider on its back The sound of you reciting the first twenty elements of the periodic table over and over in the voice of a bull would be the last thing I hear as a card flips over revealing itself to be Alexander the Great, no less

The surrealism is more literary in "Slot Machine" which starts with

People are pebbles and windows are mirrors. When the moon is pushed down the chimney's throat, the music begins.

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	5
3 line stanzas	14
4 line stanzas	17
5 line stanzas	7
6 line stanzas	4
7 line stanzas	1
Misc stanzas	3

Layouts are as regular as I've ever seen. Even the 3 "Misc" layouts are mostly regular. 3 poems have asterisks to separate stanzas, though they're hardly needed - almost all stanzas longer than 2 lines are end-stopped (there aren't many long sentences in this book). However, few poems are lists: the most common conceptual structure is to start with some declarative statements - "The ... is ..." - then have a clause beginning with "But", "Even" or "Yet" then end about 12 lines later with a sentence that uses "all", "forever", or "only".

I liked many of the poems on a first reading. I'm less sure about some of them now, but there are several I would still like to have written.