In these two poetry collections, Fossil Time (2018) and Book of Devorations (1996), the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés takes us into the nooks and crannies of time. She splices open time to reveal the innards. We are transported to another self that we didn’t know existed. The poetry is so weighty that it becomes light, as if the space between the atoms had ballooned and risen upwards. Pilar Pallarés defines Galician poetry of the last thirty years. The Galician language has been a vehicle for poetry since the medieval troubadours and the lament of a woman on St Simon’s Island waiting for the waves to arrive. Pilar embodies the voice of that woman, gives it a home, which is all we can do as the breath enters and leaves our lungs, hums, vibrates. Both these books received the Spanish Critics’ Award for Galician poetry in the year that they were published; Fossil Time won the Spanish National Book Award for Poetry in 2019.