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Isabel Galleymore

  • About
  • Reviews
  • Awards
  • 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 is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK and a Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study 2022-23.
    'Isabel Galleymore's Significant Other cuts incisively and deliciously against several fashionable poetic grains in being committed yet dispassionate, quietly concise not shrill, impersonal rather than nakedly biographical.'

    Martyn Crucefix

       'Isabel Gallyemore's debut collection, Significant Other is a vividly detailed poetic chronicle of some of the world's most fascinating species. Underpinned by the desire to discover new ways of describing the natural world, these poems carry the painstaking attention to detail of dressmaking, both in the economic precision of their metrics and their manipulation of material. Galleymore forages with wide-eyed fascination in search of new poetic ground.'
    Jade Cuttle, Poetry School
      'Attentive to the natural world through imagistic lyrics these abundant poems recall the work of Jen Hadfireld and Alice Osward, but Galleymore can also be distinctive'
    Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian
     'A briliant enacting of out failure to be properly alarmed about our impending heat-death, screaming without ever raising a voice'
    Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review, Summer 2019
    'Galleymore never misplaces a word; the concision and dense packing of these short journeys yield bursts of insight which transcend meaning... Her images are fecund, metaphor-rich affirmations of teeming oceans where brutal evolutionary imperatives occur unnoticed, except to the poet's forensic eye.'

    'Galleymore's eye for detail, and for identifying the best means of describing detail persuasively, is stupendouslty effective...Her skill is both intuitive and revelatory.'
    Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times
      'These small, hard, shining poems are as perfectly self-contained as the molluscs they describe. Significant Other may seem a slight book at first, but - like a rock pool - look closely and you'll find a whole world.'
    Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month, March 2019
    'The love poem's conventions are defined by the exclusive passions between a lover and a beloved. But for Galleymore the beloved is so many of the things in the world, the 'eight million differently constructed hearts' which includes the squid's, the snake's, also the limpet's. And so she writes a new sort of love poem, one of inclusion, and hope.'
    Juliana Spahr
    'Galleymore evokes an abundance of 'other' worlds in these beautiful poems through a combination of simplicity, empathy and sheer Blakean joy.'
    Rachael Boast
    Awards won by Isabel Galleymore Commended, 2024 A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation
    (Baby Schema)
    Short-listed, 2021 The Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize
    (Significant Other)
    Winner, 2020 The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize (Significant Other) Short-listed, 2020 The Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize (Significant Other) Short-listed, 2019 The Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection (Significant Other)
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The Carcanet Blog Near-Life Experience: Rowland Bagnall read more The Silence: Gillian Clarke read more Baby Schema: Isabel Galleymore read more The Iron Bridge: Rebecca Hurst read more Sleepers Awake: Oli Hazzard read more The Miraculous Season: V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell read more
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