"The double life of clocks" by Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe, 2002)

A page-turner, with enough high-points to make up for the inevitable dips. I like how the book begins, with "Meow" (Me. Ow?), the persona thinking she's a cat in human form. The alter-ego theme's continued less successfully for a few poems (the idea of "Pacemaker" appeals, but the poem's too long). It's as if a Creative Writing class has been given a model to follow and these are the results. Here are some first lines - "I am bath water" (p.22), "When I was a goldfish" (p.32), "If I was my boyfriend" (p.43), "I am a tiger" (p.54), "In a former life I was an athlete" (p.56), "I am God today" (p.57). The outcomes vary. The bathwater poem ends with "You will try to pull the plug/ but it would be too late;/ for you'd carry/ the whole ocean of me,/ slowly ebbing at your shoes". The erstwhile athlete in the final line says "In a former life I was a doctor" though identity isn't always so long-lasting - "Brittle weightlessness takes me beyond gravity to a place where it's possible to forget who I am" (p.46). The sounds/sights nobody else can hear/see might increase the sense of individuality, but at a cost. Houses and people are vulnerable to the weather. There are ghosts, people not being noticed. Even trees have identity issues - "The trees have forgotten how to be trees" (p.26). Later in the book, "Her skin is made of mirrors, and she camouflages herself" (p.70), which may be progress.

Amongst a few flat poems, "Orangeness of Oranges" contains an interesting surprise. The book recovers with "Spin cycle", though I feel nowadays that poem might be Flash. There's another sag near the middle of the book, "Her Big Day" one of the low points. "Chicken by moonlight" seems a rather laboured analogy. She's a phrase-maker, which helps keep some of the poems afloat - e.g. "The sky is pulled down to meet the land/ like a blind on a dirty window" (p.23). The plots can be interesting too. The final poem begins with "When, like a ravening wolf, fire ate everything in sight, turning crops into charcoal and air into poison, all the pregnant women of the land gave birth to fireflies". After years of barrenness, there's rain - "If [a drop] fell in the arms of a woman, it became a new baby smelling of dew ... The women ... crushed by the weight of the hundreds they were trying to catch".

Typo on p.27 - "the house shock so much" - "shook"? Typo on p.75 "it's eyes".

Other reviews

• Sarah Law (There are plenty of fairy-tale qualities to Ivory’s work, but the biggest darkness and dangers by far are either psychological or plain inexplicable in the simple man-made language she uses. ... Ivory’s writing is at its best when she captures the ambiguities of (female) desire through dense, illogical narratives that recount mysteries.)