Baby Schema

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.