The Double Life of Clocks
Published on 30. May 2002
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-85224-594-8 (ISBN)
Description
Helen Ivory speaks in tongues and alters time in her first collection. Here are voices lost inside mental illness, divided and diverting selves as well as sinister voices who control their madness and make things happen. She creates puppet shows in which larger-than-life forces pull the strings and write the scripts. Drawing also from the darkly dramatic world of fairytale and myth - where a red wind thick with sand erases all memory - The Double Life of Clocks turns day into night and tells the time by counting spiders.
Reviews / Votes
There is something subtle and unique about Helen Ivory's writing. You can see the shadows she moves among, the fabulists and fantasists, but there is a numbed, almost purely narrative quality to the voice which destabilises itself as it goes along. Her best poems are quite exquisite, not so much a matter of known poetic craft as of vision, instinct and frayed edgy experience playing it dead straight. -- George SzirtesMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
134 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-594-8 (9781852245948)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and is a lecturer for the UEA/National Centre for Writing online creative writing programme. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010), Waiting for Bluebeard (2013) and The Anatomical Venus (2019). Fool's World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A book of collage/ mixed media poems, Hear What the Moon Told Me, was published KFS in 2017, and a chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City, by SurVision in 2019. She has received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was awarded Arts Council funding and an Author's Award from the Society of Authors to work on The Anatomical Venus. She lives in Norwich.