Terrarium, Matthew Walsh
Goose Lane / Ice House, 2024
When I heard that Matthew Walsh was publishing a new collection of poetry—because I follow them on Instagram—I was excited. I so loved These are not the potatoes of my youth (Ice House, 2019), as well as ICQ (Anstruther, 2021), so I was keen to read Walsh’s newest book, Terrarium (Ice House, 2024). Walsh’s work is vibrant in the way they see and interpret the world around them. Poems are filled with sharp and specific imagery: there’s a man with a “crucifix tattoo on his head,” spider egg sacs in a kitchen window “are like a small newly discovered solar system,” a man who carries towels “like he found a cloud/and must return it to somewhere,” and a speaker who is “sitting in the bathtub in the dark/listening to the onomatopoeia of water.” Walsh is very good at making metaphors sparkle, so that they rise off the page into a reader’s mind and imagination in innovative ways. The wait for this new full book of Matthew Walsh poems has—in my estimation as a poet and keen reader of Canadian poetry—been well worth it.
The title of the book makes the reader think: terrariums are enclosed spaces made of glass, tiny ecosystems where a person can observe what’s happening inside with plants and (sometimes) tiny creatures. They’re a bit like aquariums for plants rather than fish, if you need a visual in your mind. The more extended metaphor, though, is that a terrarium could be compared to a global, national, local, or even personal ‘ecosystem.’ We are inside the ‘globe’ of the world—millions of us—but we seem to be more and more isolated than ever despite the Internet, all of us striving for personal connection, while trying to figure out who we are as we go on living in these strange times.
In Terrarium, as in Walsh’s chapbook, ICQ, the speaker in the poems is longing for connection in a time when everyone is so connected by the Internet but is somehow still not able to find it. It’s a bit like Sisyphus continually rolling that boulder up a hill into eternity in terms of how empty virtual ‘connectivity’ can seem. There are temporary fixes to this strange and surreal sense of being alone in a virtually driven world—of swiping left and right in a mad frenzy, and of an increase in substance addiction. Depression, too, figures into the equation, often a result of increased isolation. The lure of instant gratification doesn’t fill the void, either. In “Mr. Snuffleupagus,” Walsh reflects on the invisibility of Snuffy. Adults have never seen (or maybe just refuse to believe in) Mr. Snuffleupagus at all; they don’t have faith in the truth of it all. Things are not always what they seem on the superficial surface of our existence, and Walsh draws our attention to this truth in their work.
In “Reality,” the speaker eavesdrops to overhear a worrisome conversation between “two girls heading east” on the subway, only to discover that “their concern was intimate/info about a Los Angeles TV family.” Walsh speaks of this surreal observation on human behaviour as “knowledge that defines the contemporary/world for some unseen reason.” The discordance that exists between what we see or hear on the surface these days, and what we feel in our hearts, minds, and physical bodies, is large and sometimes overwhelming. Walsh extends this exploration of (dis)connection while thinking about the way in which artificial intelligence has also woven itself so incestuously into the world in poems like “Skeleton” and “Gatorade.” In “Skeleton,” the speaker ponders philosophically: “I don’t mention artificial intelligence/sitting in a chair that does not exist/I just wonder if are more things AI than not AI/should be the new to be or not to be.” Again, the theme that nothing is as it once was is clearly conveyed in Terrarium.
Walsh documents their search for personal identity in a truthful and revealing confessional manner. The speaker in “Moonstone,” kisses “a mechanic/in front of several mirrors/inside True Centre Muffler and Care/and it is similar to therapy,” so that the reader feels a bit voyeuristic. In “Crab,” the speaker ponders their identity after their email provider asks whether they are human or not, “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/and even I’m conflicted.” In “Shelter,” the speaker says, “I’m very sick of my own skeleton,” plans “to be fed to a tree/when released of this Matthew body/so some part of me can be/ a shelter for the living/thing staggering from the highway.” In “Soft Core,” Walsh writes: “I wish I could have let it be known/that I was queer earlier in my memory/without the years of anguish/and duplicity.” In “Zoom,” the poet’s quirky sense of humour is embodied in the lines “I would have/loved to have stayed but this Christmas/party could have been an email,” underling their keen sense of irony, observation, and poetic documentation.
Throughout Terrarium, there are echoes of specific images and phrases. There are repeated references to 3 a.m. transit rides home after a shift at work finishes, a turquoise bench “waiting for a connection on the Yonge Line,” a pomegranate, mirrors, water, dreams, night skies, and Tarot symbology. All this repetition of specific images ripples back through the poems in a metacognitive fashion. The poet fashions poems that don’t allow the reader to laze about, keeps tossing pebbles into the pond and asks readers to follow the ripples to see where they might meet a shoreline. The 3 a.m. observer takes note of tiny things like birds that are “still/silhouettes on the power line,” “a man on a ladder throwing fedoras out/a second-floor window into a dumpster,” “going skinny dipping in the Pacific” on a trip to California, and even finds Neptune as a focus point in the night sky.
What’s really beautiful about Terrarium is its confessional tone, its pure and unabashed honesty. The speaker tells the truth as they see it, and the observations become well-crafted images and metaphors. Any poet knows that this is the part that takes hard work, time, and great care. In the tiniest of spiders that manoeuvres across “some invisible silk “across a bedroom, Walsh suggests, we might realize that “human eyes aren’t meant to understand/or see all threads and connections.” Perhaps what Walsh most importantly calls their readers to consider, after reading the poems of Terrarium—in a kind of Yeatsian way—is how we all try to define ourselves, connect with others, and try to find some meaning in a world that so often feels without a centre.
