Baby Schema E-Book

Isabel Galleymore

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 31

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2024 A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024 A The Times Book of the Year 2024 'Trees crawling with babies, babies darting through the sky or buoyed by thermal vents, babies painted with false eyes' ('Fable') In Isabel Galleymore's second collection, the adorable other is not just an imagined future child, but also a tree frog, a weather-worn statue and often the speaker herself, who dreams of quitting adulthood and an endangered world. 'Mother Earth' is less an entity to be revered than a command to care-giving. Lyrics and syllabically-constrained fables examine the play and power involved in creating new life, whether biologically or via cartoonists' animation. Galleymore hones in on cuteness and its relationships to hyper-capitalism and environmental crisis to produce a deliberately queasy ecopoetics. Animal extinctions are likened to failed businesses and sainthood is granted to a dubious character named Michael Mouse. Studies of wild creatures join those of pets, pot plants and animal videos: here is a new nature – one shaped by the extremes of our contemporary desires.

Leseprobe

Baby Schema

Isabel Galleymore’s first collection, Significant Other, won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. She held the position of Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2022-23. She lectures at the University of Birmingham.

also by isabel galleymore

Significant Other (2019)

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Carcanet

Alliance House, 30 Cross Street

Manchester, m2 7aq

www.carcanet.co.uk

Text copyright © Isabel Galleymore 2024

The right of Isabel Galleymore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN 9781800173897

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

Contents

Forever, It Appears

Campaign

Busy, Busy

Head over Heels

My Earliest Memory

Coming Home

Night Thought

Squeezamal™

It’s a Set Up

Fable

Mothers

Like Nothing Else

No Word

Morning

The Pitch

Good-Natured

Heritage

Because

Kidding

A Ha-Ha

Animal Product

So Adorable

Made You Look

On Earth

Disneyland

Friends

Career of Violence

Mammal Club

Baby Schema

Starting today

What Happened

This tree frog is going extinct

Uninvited

Interior Design

Algorithm

Release

No Show

…

Belonging

Lonesome George

Yellow Diamond

More and more

Little Fly

Madam

Semi-Unintelligible

Chosen

Outbound

Bird Watching

Notes

Acknowledgements

‘The cute always in some sense designates a commodity in search of its mother’

– Lori Merish

‘We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified enough, babble and doodle’

– Northrop Frye

Baby Schema

Forever, It Appears

I wake and find it’s day again.

It happens every time.

It makes no difference if I crush

the day between my hands

or wring or drop, or squish the day

as if it were the frog –

the frog bath sponge instinctively

returns to its set shape –

I watch its simple eyes, so soft,

reopening like hours –

forever, it appears, expecting

to be taken care of.

Campaign

When Aw succeeded Ah, Aw preached the importance of a pebble’s freckled onesie, ignoring the mountain and its storm. Where Ah had ah’d over the ocean, Aw now aw’d over the ocean-dawdling dawn-hued prawn. With Ah far gone, attention turned towards the two-week seedlings of a lawn; a buzzard-hunted yawn-paused lizard; one carrot awfully small. How big the world became as it possessed once more the petit-four of insect eggs, a chicken’s moon-clipped claws.

Busy, Busy

Don’t you just love it when you’re held up

by a slug? On the path,

this hunkling of fudge

is plugging away at the task

of moving herself,

a little feather

stuck to her side as if

she plans to hand herself over

to all that stuff ungummed from

earth –

don’t you just love it?

Don’t you just

love – ?

Head over Heels

You tell me ‘forever’ will take too long

to add; your initials finished, mine just starting

into the trunk. We both know summer

is coming to a close in this park with small petting

zoo, a stray picnic blanket or two; the warden

pretty much out of sight – I check, check once more,

and watch as a wasp sheepdogs a huddle of children

across the grassy stretch. Smaller than the others,

one child remains beside the pen where the

Fainting Goat is kept; the animal continues to

observe its name every time the child tries

a shriek or scream. Again, again. It’s difficult to say

which the child loves best: the goat, or its four legs

swivelling up to the sky. One day I’ll know