A Little Like This

Comparative titles are hard and Helen Ivory is wonderful

I’ve been feeling a little disconnected from myself recently. Out with lanterns looking and looking and looking. Somehow I forgot, it seems, that I know exactly where I hide, I know exactly where to find myself. I am in poems. I lurk between stanzas and I creep through lines and I hibernate nestled under the heaviest metaphors. How could I forget.

Poetry is a tether for me. It ties me down, buries my feet in the ground so I can stay upright, wraps around my ribs so I can remain intact. It reminds me that I am real. I read poems and I come back down to earth, I settle inside my own bones and I feel connected to everything. Even myself.

I’ve been working on a proposal for my creative non-fiction/horror in verse project that I swear will have a snappier name sometime soon. I’ve been writing and connecting and growing and building and the book, the idea, is clearer than ever. It is no easier to explain with tongue and teeth but it has a shape, it feels real.

One part of the proposal has been more difficult than the rest. For most I could ramble and rant but this section, the comparative titles section, snuck up on me and all of a sudden it was looking me in the eye, the blank page of it all. I’m not for a single second saying that nothing like this book exists, that it’s just oh so special and innovative and different and how could anything possibly compare, I’m saying my mind went as blank as the page in front of me. I searched and searched and googled wild combinations of words in an attempt to find something. I found a few. I found books that moved and broke and delighted and inspired me. I would like to share them with you but, as you may have noticed, I am a rambler. Allow me to talk about books and poems and words and I may never stop, no matter how hard my insides scream please please please for the love of god take a breath. So, it will take a few posts. I have five books that I want to share with you, but the one I need to begin with is a poetry collection. Of course it is.

The Anatomical Venus by Helen Ivory is a collection that gives voice to hundreds of years of voiceless women. Perhaps not voiceless, exactly, perhaps not even silenced exactly, perhaps not even ignored is the right word. Maybe there isn’t a big enough word for women pushed aside, pulled down, boxed and kept and caged. Women whose power was denied, goodness abused, autonomy disrespected. In The Anatomical Venus, Helen Ivory gave these women time and attention and words and the respect they deserve. I loved it. I devoured it. It was painful, it was hard on my heart but delicious to my mind. The language is rich and weighty, the imagery painted with the thickest, treacliest paint in the all the shades of the night, the sea, the forest and the guts.

I love this collection and since reading it have also read her newest collection, Constructing a Witch, which I swallowed whole. Poetry is where I find myself and poetry like this, with heart and soul and courage, is where I find parts of myself I didn’t even know to search for.

Using The Anatomical Venus as a comparative title feels almost cheeky. Can my work reach these heights? Oddly enough, the more I read and absorb these poems, the more I feel that I can try . Sometimes work that you feel soak into your skin and travel with your blood can make you doubt yourself. This work, however, these words and these women and this poet, fill me with belief and bravery. More potently, they fill me with defiance. I will use this collection not only as a comparative title but as motivation to write and write and write.

Meg

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