ICQ, Matthew Walsh
Anstruther,
2021
I need to admit that I’m a fierce fan of Walsh’s poetry, and that I really loved These are not the potatoes of my youth. Like that book, this one is also confessional in tone. ICQ is about trying to find out who you are, where and when you can safely be yourself, and how we all seek a path to walk through this life. The poem that opens the chapbook is “Mystery,” a piece that speaks to the complexity of romantic relationships. Here, a boyfriend “has no ears” to listen when the speaker tries “to explain/the verb of my own heart.” There it is—that quickly and deftly turned Walsh line that pierces you when you least expect it while reading. In “Ellipses,” Walsh writes of how religion harms self-expression, especially in terms of sexuality. They write: “it was as if talk of the human//body was denied due to internal error or the mixture/of Catholicism and shame in knowing you genuflect//in a building to worship a man who lives in the sky.”
Someone’s need to hide their true identity, because of society’s ridiculous and archaic hang ups with sex, is further explored in “Soft Core,” when Walsh writes “I had never seen this before, the moment my desires/were on screen like this” and “my mistake was accepting opinion of others/to be true when the only true thing is I am living.” Further, they write: “I wish I could have let it be known/that I was queer earlier in my memory.” Then, in “Iamb,” the quiet moment of certain realization is written down: “I realized that I found my people much later in life/and that I can make choices for myself.” These journeys that we go on take up so much of our lives, and we keep evolving as we go, even if there is a great deal of pain in the middle of the growth spurts that we encounter.
The world of cell phones and social media—along with the duelling notions of human isolation and connectivity—plays a key role in ICQ, which is internet language for “I seek you.” Internet dating is common now, and people are tethered to their phones in a way that has only increased in recent years. In “Desire,” during sex, the speaker says, “like the internet I open window/after window after window.” In “Pea Cloud,” auto-correct in a text message changes “I think I am working through/Mon-Thurs to I am ethereal,” further underlining the way in which we confuse ourselves with the way we speak, write, and communicate with one another. In “Mystery,” again, Walsh ponders: “It’s weird to think humans created language/yet we can’t speak to each other—it’s like texting.” We lose and then re-make meaning in new ways when we communicate through electronic devices, perhaps more often muddying the water of meaning than we can ever really know.
Deep undercurrents of beauty run through ICQ when Walsh conjures up “a perfectly laid out deer/skeleton near dark,” a “world where you can’t tell ocean from sky,” and “if my body was dot dot dot it was punctuation, ellipses.” In “Desire,” they write of “spring blossoms in the air, Alexander Keith’s, white moths/catching moonlight while he ate the apple off the knife.” In “Pea Cloud,” there is “an affinity to rise from the ocean//feeling like I was born, made of sea foam, cloud.” Walsh has a way with images, so that a sunrise after a night of lovemaking is remembered vividly as “this baby/blue, then pink” seeping “out from what was the pupil//of the sky over Lake Ontario.” Their work is stunning and fresh at every turn of line, couplet, and page.
While this chapbook contains just twelve poems, Matthew Walsh’s ICQ is honest, poignant, and feels substantial in the themes it addresses. Reading it just makes a person wish that the next full- length collection was already here. This is a chapbook that will hopefully lead to more work. For me, as a keen reader of poetry, that time can’t come quickly enough.
