Isabel Galleymore is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. Her debut pamphlet, Dazzle Ship, was published in 2014 by Worple Press. Her work has featured in magazines such as Poetry, Poetry London and Poetry Review. In 2016, she was a poet-in-residence at the Tambopata Research Centre in the Amazon rainforest. In 2017, Isabel received an Eric Gregory Award.
Search for the etymology of the word metaphor and you’ll find fragments of Old French, Latin and Greek, which, when translated, mean ‘to carry over’, ‘to bear’. When I visualise these definitions, I can’t help but see the former as a husband carrying his wife over the threshold, the latter as a more burdensome relationship – perhaps one marked by imposition. ‘Odd how a thing is most itself when likened’, Richard Wilbur remarked. But how is that thing also compromised through comparison?
This question looms largest in my mind when I’m writing about animals. Given the way it foists a human agenda onto nonhuman others, anthropomorphism is sometimes understood as a dirty word. Yet, I’m curious as to how these figurative devices can stray from cats in bow-ties and bananas in pyjamas in order to create intimacy as well as estrangement. Perhaps because of these interests, much of my writing starts with research. ‘Kind’, for example, emerged from a day spent at an owl sanctuary where many owls have become ‘imprinted’: a term used, in this case, for animals who become so familiar with humans that they begin to take on certain human behaviours. Likewise, ‘A Note’ was influenced by my reading into bees: in particular, their leaving of pheromones to mark used sources of nectar.
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The Ocean
Wasn't walking beside her
walking with the ocean below
when you didn't know her and wanted to?
In that heat, along that path
you hesitated
at a slug, beached
like a tiny grey whale –
thirty tonnes and seventy years
of navigating the continental shelf
assumed by this soil-scuffing inch
and what would she make of you?
The ocean blinked.
Say you took that step, or say you fell,
wouldn't she move you miles in herself?
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Listen to Isabel read 'The Ocean' here:
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New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018.
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