"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.)

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

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window

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room

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sky

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night

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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.