Significant Other
by Isabel Galleymore
A cloud takes on the shape of a tortoise.
The tortoise can never
repay the gesture. Unashamedly,
its owner once believed that it answered
hello in its reptilian hiss
as she once believed that he, who delighted
her body, delighted her body
only. Did the creature ever think
a thought her way?
The tortoise snaps its tortoisey jaws
eating all that’s laid on
without looking up.
From Significant Other. Reproduced with kind permission of Carcanet.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2019
Significant Other
Isabel Galleymore
About Isabel Galleymore
Isabel Galleymore (b. 1988, London) was the first poet-in-residence at Tambopata Research Centre in the Amazon Rainforest. ‘The opportunity to encounter different types of creature –spider monkeys, pink-toed tarantulas, caiman — was irresistible’, she writes, and many of the poems in Significant Other display the fruits of that opportunity. Another residency in Cornwall gave her the opportunity to make a close study of local rockpools, and the collection is liberally dotted with sonnets about bivalves and barnacles, including the magnificent spiny cockle which gives the book its cover illustration, ‘let[ting] / its long pink foot slip like a leg / from the slit of its crenulated skirt’.
Galleymore works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham; her poetry appeared in Carcanet’s New Poetries VII anthology, and in a pamphlet from Worple Press, Dazzle Ship. She’s currently working on a new pamphlet of prose poem fragments, tentatively titled Cyanic Pollens.
