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In recent weeks, I have seen Republicans in the USA accuse Democrats of ‘using some kind of sorcery’ and being in some way responsible for summoning up natural disasters like Hurricane Helene.

These accusations are typical of those made against persons suspected of witchcraft, usually resulting in all the consequences of paranoia – persecution, torture, murder – we are witnessing the start of a literal witch-hunt. All of which makes this a particularly interesting time to be reading Helen Ivory’s new poetry collection.

Constructing A Witch is a blazingly angry book, but the word that came to me on a first reading was ‘playful’. This does not mean by any means that it is a frivolous or light-hearted one – the pace and tone keep the book from feeling like a manifesto or a rant but take nothing from its impact. It plays with language in a way that reminds me of Rebecca Tamás’ essay in the White Review The Songs of Hecate:

But what I want to do here is think about this ‘occult moment’ in relation to poetry. I want to explore this because these occult elements, to me, seem to offer something that speaks particularly to the nature of and difficulties of poetry itself – to what it might be possible to make language do, to what might be made possible through language. My particular occult interest is the witch – the witch as an explosively radical female figure, a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing.

For example:

Rain has been quarrelsome the whole night long and raps at the door to come in. Rain is the sky’s voice, the moon’s halo. Rain is bedlam on the stone body of the house – spiders have forsaken their meticulous webs. Rain is the marriage of toads.

The Moon’s Halo

The book opens with ‘The Waking‘, a declaration of authorial intent – an open and explicit campaign to salvage the victims of witch hunts throughout the ages:

I hold up these rekindled women and we reel, we howl, and we shoot our filthy mouths off.

Ivory handles with dexterity multiple forms as well as ideas – prose poems, found poems, even collages and the research behind it is formidable – it encompasses witch trials in Scotland, Pendle and Salem, looks at the depiction of witches in literature, surrealist and pre-Raphaelite art, film and folktale.

It has echoes of Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ rising with her red hair, and the Anne Sexton poem ‘Her Kind’ (referenced in the title of this review), and reclaims motifs from texts ranging from the Bible and Malleus Maleficarium to The Wizard of Oz:

          Gleaner of herbs

          hallower of the compass —-

          Midwife of shadows

          low vixen with blood on its maw —-

          A childless wraith

          in a child’s picture book

          The worst mother

          man ever invented.

Some Definitions of Witch

Herbs, moss, forest, hares, blood, flesh, the red hair, the claws recur throughout the book. Familiar words to evoke witchcraft, like meddled, scold, cunning, vixen, wild, troublesome, tainted, cackle, howl, barren, wraith, spite build up a picture of the sustained misogyny which characterises the witch trials not only of the seventeenth century, but more disturbingly, our own.

What we discover here is a paradigm of what it means to be an ‘incel’ – the projection, scapegoating and othering, that reflects the personal disappointment of men who expected that women were there to love them:

          Man needed a help-meet –

          a soft-fleshed companion –

          The garden was a lonely place after all.

          So in God’s name he created a Woman

          to take in his laundry

The men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast

Incompetent housewives, opinionated women, mothers who failed to bear children, or whose children died, women who loved where they weren’t wanted, or who refused to love at all, lovers who weren’t compliant enough:

You choke them till they learn to say

          I love you in a pretty way

Cackle

or had the effrontery to be ugly, old or ill, all face the sadism, loathing and disgust of the witchfinder.  As Rebecca Tamás says:

         These women are undoubtedly BAD and EVIL and GROSS and DEGENERATE and UGLY and SEXY and SHALLOW and PAINTED and OLD and YOUNG and HUNGRY and MAD and DANGEROUS and AWFUL.

STRANGE AND COMPLEX LOVE: Kirsty Logan on ‘The Unfamiliar’

Witch-finding in this book may also take the form of domestic abuse, body shaming or medical neglect of problems surrounding menstruation (icky), pregnancy or childbirth and menopause (hysterical).

A woman may find herself reduced to the roles of wicked stepmother, gossiping crone, seductive temptress, is presented as lustful, dirty and defiant. Or even turned into trophies and souvenirs as her persecution is reduced to a tourist attraction. Only feminine solidarity stands between her and her fate:

Is it normal to wake up in a bread oven night after night;

          to flush blood away like you have emergency stores;

                      for words to fall from your left hemisphere?

And all the women on the internet

Faces blazing in the blue light of their screens, say

                      yes, this is normal

                                                          we are here

                                                                      we can hear you now

34 Symptoms of the Menopause

I have been her kind.

Constructing A Witch by Helen Ivory is available now from Bloodaxe Books and good booksellers.

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