Baby Schema

Isabel Galleymore's second book is a collection of ecopoetry that explores cuteness, care and commodification in an age of hyper-capitalism and environmental crisis.

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Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2024
A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 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.