Significant Other

by Isabel Galleymore

Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019. In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the ‘eight million differently constructed hearts' of species currently said to inhabit Earth. These are part of the significant other of her title; so too are the intimacies—loving, fraught, stalked by loss and extinction—that make up a life. The habit of foisting human agendas on non-human worlds is challenged. Must we still describe willows as weeping? In the twenty-first century, is it possible to be ‘at one' with nature? The poems reflect on our desire to locate likeness, empathy and kinship with our environments, whilst embracing inevitable difference. As the narratives belonging to animal fables, Doomsday Preppers and climate change deniers are adapted, new metaphors are found that speak of both estrangement and entanglement. Drawing at times from her residency in the Amazon rainforest, Galleymore delves into a world of pink-toed tarantulas, the erotic lives of barnacles, and caged owls that behave like their keepers. The human world revises its own measure in the light of these poems.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 28, 2019

About the author

Isabel Galleymore (born 1988) is an acclaimed British poet, critic, and academic whose work explores ecopoetics and environmental themes. Her debut collection, Significant Other (Carcanet, 2019), won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Baby Schema (Carcanet, 2024), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry and selected as a Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation and a Times Best Poetry Collection of 2024. Galleymore’s poetry, noted for its sharp imagery and innovative engagement with nature, has appeared in prestigious outlets such as Poetry, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books, and has been featured on BBC Radio 3 and 4.

A Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, Galleymore holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Reading, an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews, and a PhD from the University of Exeter, where her research focused on metaphor in nature writing pedagogy. Her academic work, including the monograph Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), examines ecocriticism, metaphor, and interdisciplinary environmental literature. She has also co-edited The Clearing, an online magazine for nature and place-based writing, and edited The Bee Is Not Afraid Of Me: A Book of Insect Poems (The Emma Press, 2021) for children.

Galleymore’s contributions to poetry and environmental scholarship have earned her numerous accolades, including the Eric Gregory Award (2017), a Hawthornden Fellowship (2012), and the Walter Jackson Bate Fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute (2022–23), where she explored cuteness in environmental culture. In 2023, she received an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship for her project on ecopoetic practice. Her pamphlets, Dazzle Ship (Worple, 2014) and Cyanic Pollens (Guillemot, 2020), reflect her immersive experiences, including a residency in the Peruvian Amazon. Galleymore continues to shape contemporary ecopoetics through her innovative poetry and critical work.

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A precise and complex collection, addressing the world of limpets, starfish and other bivalves, and using our relationship with the natural world to explore personal romantic relationships. Galleymore asks what metaphors means, and how we can best engage with the natural world when we humans have changed it so profoundly. Often dense in imagery, these poems are rarely more than one or two sentences long, but are vivid and tightly controlled. The studies of sea creatures are especially careful and imaginative, and Galleymore dives into her subject, allowing it to live and breathe on the page. Very short poems can be full of nuance and depth, such as "At First", a poem about climate change or perhaps a relationship turned bad, which is devastating in its brevity. Quoted below in full:

At First

The seasons grew untidy;
the months filled up with rain.
At first it came soft as sheep.
Inside the sheep a wolf, of course
inside the wolf a man intent
on acting out his tale.

Some of the later poems in the collection don't have the same emotional punch or freshness of imagery as the earlier pieces. The intensity of the work is hard to sustain. But this is an imaginative and refreshing collection, which feels both relevant to our world, demanding our attention, yet nuanced and understated in its outlook. Recommended.

[Cleo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Satisfyingly seacore, this is a good collection of poems. While a few of them washed over me, unremarkable, some others gave me the glow in my chest you can get when a poem unfurls itself, revealing itself to be more delightful than it first appeared.

Favourites: Ocean, The Starfish, Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk, Harvest, Luminescent.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased this book because of one poem, “The Starfish,” which I encountered in The Forward Book of Poetry 2020: The Best Poems from the Forward Prizes. This book was also listed as one of that anthology’s five Best First Books. I didn’t love all Galleymore’s collection. I’m not sure I followed her intention in some of the poems, but what stood out for me were her original, brilliant, and memorable metaphors for sea life. How did rather whimsical visual descriptions make dinner time somehow more disgusting, not to mention tragic for the eaten? Loved these! (If you’re about to have dinner, you might want to wait on reading farther.)

Here are a few samples from my favorites.

“The Starfish”

“creeps like expired meat –...
shivers upon an immobile mussel
whose navy macintosh is zipped
against the anchor of its fat paw…”


“Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk”

“It is a modest party hat
in which something like a head resides…”

until the dog whelk climbs atop:

“an ornate seat upon an elephant…
as the limpet rises from the stone
to become half-mushroom, half bucking bronco.”


“Spiny Cockle” (before the starfish arrives to make it dinner)

“From their metre-deep sandy resorts
the waves have raised these hard orbs:
clenched like cement hedgehogs
they wear their ribs inside out
and pricked with a white picket fence
to keep their soapdish interiors….”

[Gertie]

I really liked. Lovely to read aloud

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I believed I was like
the rockpool's tuft
of ale-brown algae
that exclusively blushed
luminescent blue
when poked by that
boy with a stick
who was really hoping
to poke a starfish --
only to find
I can, all night,
by any breath's ripple,
perform my own borealis."

"Luminescent"

Isabel Galleymore's poems in Significant Other pull me back into the frigid, windowless science halls I walked years ago, a rapt visitor in the private collections of the natural history museum, opening white cupboard upon white cupboard of canopic specimen. I gazed at them and they regarded me deadly in their disassembled, embalmed parts. How crushed and silent I might have been, too, by a single of their alert, living afterthoughts. What blinking, open hearts of science and heart-chamber thaumaturgy these poems are.

[Rahan]

‘Some evenings we gave over entirely/ to making the moon one of us.’

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinated by how nicely imaginative it is, and a brilliant example of a collection of short poems flowing into each-other and dissolving and dissolving—

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot to like about this, and I ended up bookmarking quite a few poems! Oceans was probably my favourite (so what a great opener).

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderfully observed poems that, in their careful attention, morph into alternative descriptive possibility. The starfish "creeps like expired meat" with a "shopping bag stomach"; the robin is "A road sign / with a fire warning / in its breast..."; a crab "sits like the lid of a pie". There are so many rich descriptions of animal life, using a register of human familiarity but, in so doing, making the human strange again, more arbitrary and unformulated. Many poems are actually a single sentence, but Galleymore handles the rhythm and weighting well, not losing the focal point of the imagery as the line builds. There are a couple of weaker 'it's the way...' type poems, often very short and relying on simple terse language, but there are so many strong and thickened pieces of excellent work that the reader feels the significance of all of these tiny others, these non-human lives with which we share our Umwelt.

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourites: Once, Choosing, Say Heart, Nectaries, Harvest.

[Mark Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, beautiful and despite its cast of characters, all too-human