I’m afraid Isabel Galleymore’s collection Baby Schema just isn’t for me. It annoyed me, and I ended up skim-reading the last few poems. Partly this was because of the mono-theme underlying the work throughout (sadly a common approach for some modern collections); the reader gets little relief.
Also, in general I struggle with self-indulgent poems where the ‘I’ is a constant presence, giving us an almost untranslatable personal experience. The danger with such an approach is that all we get is a poet working something through for themselves; something then shared and for which the reader’s potential response might seem like an afterthought.
Which in this case is a shame, because there are some big topics in this collection; topics which, in my view, could be made more ‘universal’ and relatable by the poem being a little more ‘distanced’. Although I recognise the raw emotion behind that personal experience, the way it is fed to me is somewhat alienating.
And I must pass comment on the long poem ‘Disneyland’. First it is arbitrarily cut-up into 100-syllable pages – which means breaks in the flow between stanzas and across pages. And secondly, in terms of format, it is as if just about every possibly formatting gimmick has been thrown at the piece. And sadly that’s how it comes across to this reader, gimmicky.
Others clearly love the whole collection – indeed it’s a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Maybe they regarded ‘Disneyland’ in a different light…
Ian Gouge - Writer 