icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2024
2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
The 2025 Trillium Book Awards will be announced on June 18, 2025.
Matthew Walsh grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in Toronto. Their poems and short stories have appeared in Joyland, the Capra Review, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, and Geist; in a chapbook entitled ICQ; and in their celebrated book-length collection These are not the potatoes of my youth, a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards. Terrarium is Walsh’s second full-length collection.
Much as your first collection, Terrarium seems very much constructed as a book-length project. Do you see your books-to-date, or your writing more broadly, in terms of projects? How do manuscripts get built?
Yes, it started out as a book-length project called Loose Future. It was called that for a long time. I started writing these really short, confined poems and the project shifted. It started getting personal and more like broken interrogations about the things I would see on the street or the internet. Then A.I. started creeping in here and there and I just had this idea of all these broken little glimpses of a person’s life. I looked for the bizarre and the Wonder Bread truck. Most of this book is inspired by my self induced isolations and things I’ve overheard or seen in real life, or these very vivid dreams I was having, past failed relationship, what we know and don’t know, failures and the little tiny victories that can be as simple as a rat dragging away a paper plate.
Was “Loose Future” always a placeholder title, or was it more a matter of the book moving beyond it, and towards something else?
Loose Future could have been the title but I started writing these more 14 line poems, like sonnets or sonnet-like. And I began to think of confinements. How we can be trapped in these repetitive cycles or how we have to contain ourselves. And my friend was making terrariums at the time and I kept thinking of being able to see things or to desire something but there is some barrier in the way of you achieving a goal or wanting to be desired and to desire something that is sometimes right in front of you but you can’t get it it. So the book became Terrarium some time after that.
What brought about your fondness for the sonnet? What do you feel the sonnet allows that might not be possible through other forms?
I didn’t adhere specifically to the sonnet form totally and completely, but I wanted the poems or the majority of them to be terse, short and sweet. There are some longer poems but for the most part I tried to stick to a 14 line rule. I like the history of the sonnet and the constraint that it comes with it. I wanted the poems to feel broken or confined in some way to their weird perspectives and world.
How did this book feel different from what you were attempting in your debut? Following a debut can often be tricky, especially with the positive attention yours received. Was there anything you were attempting to move away from or towards with the poems in your second?
Some poets keep doing the same thing or a variation on themes that work for them. I feel like there are some similarities. I love to break lines in unexpected ways to create surprises or tension. Each line I want to feel like the reader is on a cliff or something like that, to keep the excitement and energies. I tried not to mention a single potato or have the poems be specifically about me. I think I managed to make it about the environment the speaker inhabits and the world they are seeing and still have it be personal and also about what is going on in the bigger world with art, A.I. , and capitalism. I wanted the book to feel varied and different and more cerebral and sly.
When I asked about what drew you to poetry over any other particular form back in 2019, as part of your “12 or 20 questions” interview, you answered: “I just like fragments.” Does that still hold? And after two published poetry collections, has your relationship with the fragment changed or evolved?
Most of my poems are inspired by the pieces I see throughout a day. It could be the last on the subway with a bunch of dollar store flowers in her hair or a pigeon in the middle of the road. I tried to get meaning out of these subtle little moments and tried to give them more weight. I like to go and eavesdrop or catch little snippets of conversations, and try to make poems out of those fragments as well. Most of my stuff starts with pieces or a turn of phrase I try to turn into something else, if that makes sense.
I’m curious about your relationship to form. Beyond the sonnets in this particular collection, have you a potential shape in mind when you begin to compose? Are there particular structures in the back of your head, or is the process more intuitive, formed through the process of composition?
I just have these unconventional ideas about form. I would say they are “sonnets” or “gonnets” not sonnets. I wanted to keep the book clipped and have short poems with a few longer ones thrown in. I wanted the collection to feel fractured and vulnerable. Some of the poems black out on themselves. I just wanted to use the collection to experiment and play. Everyone was saying the second collection is the hardest so I internalized that and was really hard on myself. I made up words. I listened to what was happening around me. The Cocteau Twins are mentioned because a lot if not all of their songs have no real words, and just evoke a feeling or a memory through their use of no words. A lot of the collection is about avoiding the real problem. I love to use a fixed form to get started and I thought the sonnet was the best fit for me this time around. My first book had a lot of long lines and was because it was travelling across Canada in a Greyhound bus. This was more of a fixed place for Terrarium. There is a brief detour with an ex boyfriend to Los Angeles. Otherwise picture me in Toronto walking around and looking at all the things that aren’t there anymore.
You almost make it sound as though Terrarium is a book populated by ghosts. Is Terrarium a book populated by ghosts?
I don’t think there is a single ghost in this book! It’s about things that aren’t there, lost time, dreams, failures, little successes. The book mentions a few book stores and Toronto locations that aren’t there anymore, for instance, and things that are ephemeral. Eliot’s Books is gone, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library is gone, for instance. Not to be grim, but what lasts? I just kept thinking about that.
Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Terrarium was completed? What have you been working on since?
I just finished a chap book collab with someone, so we each wrote ten short poems for that project. I have four poems for one project that I’m slowly working on and I have about 14 poems for this new poetry book that has a bit of steam behind it and I’m excited for that one. I’m going to the middle of nowhere in July for ten days to live in a trailer so I’m hoping to finish at least a solid draft of that poem. The town is between two ghost towns. It’s about working minimum wage jobs and capitalism and silent reading and making art. I found this quote from Clarice Lispector I have in the back of my mind for inspiration.
rob mclennan’s latest, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, October 2025), is already up for pre-order. Do you need to know anything else?
