Significant Other

Isabel Galleymore

• Verlag: Carcanet Poetry
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781784107123
• Thema: Letteratura
• Thema: Poesia

Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021

Shortlisted for the 2020 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize

Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for The 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection

The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019

A Telegraph Book of the Year 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.

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Dedication
3. Epigraph
5. Ocean
6. The Starfish
7. Once
8. By Ourselves
9. Robin
10. Choosing
11. Slipper Limpet
12. The Ash
13. A Stranger
14. Into the Woods
15. Kind
16. Goose Barnacle
17. Say Heart
18. True Animal
19. Seahorse
20. Together
21. Day
22. At First
23. No Inclination
24. Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk
25. Difficult Cup
26. Spirit Human
27. The Scrotum Frog
28. I Keep You
29. Nectaries
30. Eye &am...