Kirby Reviews Terrarium by Matthew Walsh

Words in search of a body: Matthew Walsh’s sophomore turn in Terrarium.

Terrarium, Matthew Walsh. Goose Lane Editions, 2024.

There was something so disarmingly charming about poet Matthew Walsh’s highly touted debut, writing so fresh right down to its playful title reflective of its contents, These Are Not the Potatoes of My Youth. Loving nothing more than a plate of mashed and gravy, I was smit. How could you not smile, want to place it in your cart? Dream of that perfect first bite. Walsh delivers here, and like their wonderful, perfectly-sized bright green & yellow Anstruther Press chapbook ICQ, Terrarium, offers another solid sampling of Walsh’s fantastically queer way of seeing the world, connecting the dots.

Come to think of it, there’s a bevy of young queer Canadian poets covering a similar terrain: Anton Pooles, David Ly, Jake Byrne, Zoe Imani Sharpe, Joshua Whitehead, Annick MacAskill, Patrick Grace, MLA Chernoff, Rebecca Salazar, Fan Wu, A. Light Zachary, Nolan Nathasha, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Ben Ladouceur, John Elizabeth Stinzi, Kess Mohammadi, Amanda Merpaw — just to name the very few off the top of my head. Poets ushering in a brave new wave of wonderment, self-reflection, and queer engagement with a world that until quite recently has mostly been mistakenly represented as “straight” or “correct” (or, as I like to say, “non-gay”). The connective tissue here is that most — if not all — of these writers are looking at what it is to have a body, how they (in the world) shape their bodies, how their bodies in the world shape them (if at all). This queer body, which is queer to anyone who actually has one — it’s not like we’re ever taught, encouraged to be in/enjoy our being a body beyond fluffy slogans. (Missed that class.) How our bodies are always under some kind of attack from without from within. So, as an elder queer, I love love love reading what these clever young ones come up with in order just to be here. Look at this take from Walsh’s “Crab”: 

My email provider just asked me to verify
That I’m human completely
Something not easily done
For as a queer it can take a lot
To convince the people in power
I have the same organs and teeth

Where Walsh’s Potatoes was pre-pandemic, Terrarium is post-. We’ve clearly gone indoors, the terrarium makes for a lovely “pandemic bubble.” The opening lines in “Head”: “Just ignore me / I’m feeling better now,” acting as though “everything is okay,” when it never really is. Later, in “Cloud Glare,” a friend is alarmed by a tweet “turn me into condos daddy” . . . “OMG what happened?” . . . “I texted was trying to be humorous / Maybe I make people worry / please don’t / I will never be condos” 

Here’s the queer brilliance. What keeps me here. The playful retort. The silliness of what passes for drama online (the frustrations of missing any/all humour in such exchanges, “don’t worry”). Often simply stating the obvious, which Walsh does exceedingly well.

On dating apps I’m less than
ten feet from the person I’m
Intended to love.

Is there a connection between one’s bodiless online banter and one’s search for a body even if/when it’s our own?

I travel a lot in my mind
It’s the easiest way to leave the body

Terrarium offers rich dreamscapes, dreams and ghosts and skeletons, moonstones, dark clouds, a donkey at Bay & St. Joseph we both cherish. Ripe with Walsh’s signature figments of imagination, here from “Earth”:

There are poems on the longish side, not to suggest they’re too long, but dense, flavourful, only at times repetitive. Numerous satisfying entrées to return to. And, it comes in at a decent length for a collection, 71 pages, in luxurious textured papers accustomed to the Icehouse Poetry imprint at Goose Lane with a striking cover by Justina Dollard, reminiscent of a series of line drawn characters Walsh introduced to us early in the pandemic on social media — ”mini-cartoons” that were a big help to me personally.

Then, there’s this favourite li’l terror of mine, “Resurrection”:

At work a man walked in little circles
outside the bathroom
I went over
asked if he was okay
without looking up from his phone
he said too many men
crucifix tattoo on his head
Easter weekend
I nodded and said I know
Just when you think they’re gone
they rise

Alongside “Swan Dive” (where a perfectly placed comma changes everything!), their LA and San Fran excursions (“where I kissed Pepsi from your lips”), their unruly sonnet (“looking for the doorknob”), and getting groceries (“I really should have chosen to make porn / for the bear community / when I had the opportunity in 2005”), the best use of Gatorade, reminding us “being human isn’t all it appears to be,” that . . . “when grass is cut or destroyed / that smell we all proclaim to love / is actually a distress call from a world / we can’t even begin to imagine.”

And suddenly I realize, that Matthew, they’ve done it again. Only this time, it’s a terrarium cleverly disguised as a fetching book of poems.

— Kirby’s new collection is she from knife | fork | book. kirbyshe.com.