Poets You Gotta Know: Michael Walsh
"But for my beast bigger than a football field/ I’ll croon of your rebel moss,/ dirty roots and reeds with throats and legs/ like swishy millipedes."
Queer Nature is one of our favorite anthologies of poems from the last few years. It’s a brilliantly curated collection of poems by LGBTQIA+ writers exploring nature and the human relationship to the non-human environment. The editor introduced the anthology in Orion in the following way: “Here you will find love poems, meditations on queer bodies and landscapes, laments for the world we are destroying, poems of survival, and calls for environmental justice. Here we claim gay bars and bedrooms as habitats as vital as fields, forests, and riverbanks, because culture and nature, like gender, are interpretations meant to be expanded. If nature poetry is a monocrop, no single aesthetic, attitude, or voice defines Queer Nature.” That editor is Michael Walsh, the author of his own two stellar collections of poems. We love Walsh’s work, and are keen for him to gain a wider readership.
Walsh currently lives in southwest Wisconsin after many years in Minneapolis. He has published two books, Creep Love (Autumn House Press) and The Dirt Riddles (University of Arkansas), and two chapbooks with Red Dragonfly Press, Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks. Creep Love was a 2022 Lambda Gay Poetry Finalist. His poems have appeared in places such as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Great River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner.
“The Dirt Riddles begins simply enough,” writes Scott Hightower for Fogged Clarity: “A youth coming-of-age on a dairy farm. The family business is one of tending to animals and plants. First loves are great loves: mother, landscape (per the attention of the wonder of a youth), father, grandmother, radio, river, and green. One quickly filters in a quick wash of iodine, the smell of manure, the permeating smell of living and deteriorating, cow, and the hermetically sealed sexuality of childhood.” Writing about The Dirt Riddles for Basalt Magazine, James Crews writes: “Anyone who’s spent time on the prairie knows that the wind is capable of playing any number of tricks on the mind and that the land feels haunted by bison, which were slaughtered and decimated. It’s commendable that, even as Walsh speaks of dark matters, of the difficult aspects of growing up gay in a rural place, his poems never devolve into self-pity or melodrama; they skirt the boundary between sentiment and artifice and end up moving us again and again.” As Patricia Hampl wrote of the book: “These fierce lyrics burn away the fat of nostalgia and evoke a lost way of life that was beloved but also bruising. The poems form an enthralling plot, moving deftly from a boyhood on the farm to the urban life of adulthood with its city gardens, love, passion, and memory. The result is a book that establishes both a world and a voice.”
Of Creep Love, Walsh’s second, collection, Nin Andrews writes: “It’s a rare poet who can make such powerful poetry from pain, such lyrical beauty out of unthinkable suffering as Walsh has done in his latest collection, Creep Love.” Emily August writes for ANMLY that “Walsh’s traumatic realism…produces a harrowing collection, in the word’s multiple senses: as farm implements, these poems distress the very soil they describe; as literary objects, they lacerate, wound, and vex the spirit. This book asks you to turn toward, not away. To accept the testimony of the wounded child. And to be honest about the complex selves we become and revise and discard as we stumble through the healing process.”
Here are a few poems by Walsh to tide you over until you can get to the bookshop or library:
The Kids Who Carved into Petroglyphs
At Jeffers Petroglyphs
By their initials and first names
scratched into quartzite
underfoot, I know the culprits: Otto
like a fancy scar
on a buffalo’s flank, Sven
muddling the lines of a glyph,
the meaning of its shape forgotten, and Judy
who needed to record the date
of defacement. I hear her story from the guide:
how she stole her father’s chisel,
chipped her way into a turtle’s back,
how much shame she brought
to her family in this search for the lost meanings
hidden within the shapes of the letters,
written on a shell next to the sun, an attempt,
if I’m generous,
to contrast two languages and find,
in the mixed-up symbols,
the trees of her homeland cut down long ago.
She still lives. I believe, on some days,
wherever she is, she hears the forest mumbling
when the wind blows across the carved twigs
of her name, out here, whispering to the nearby warriors,
asking forgiveness for this trespass.
On a Back Road, an Abandoned Barn
No one knows how many years it took for the oak to rise like a mast through the hole. Its roots sunk to the bedrock. Here on this shallow plain its shade drifts and ripples full as a sail. Each time the breeze pushes this wreck deeper into weeds, a rafter snaps like rigging.
Love Song for a Floating Bog
Coming to life in floods, my weedy monster breaks loose from shore, forces white speed boats off the waves. I know you won’t love me back. But for my beast bigger than a football field I’ll croon of your rebel moss, dirty roots and reeds with throats and legs like swishy millipedes. Do you think and see down there, underneath willow trees hitching a ride to the deeps? The locals hate when you bump into their docks, tangle their motors, bubble and fester alongside their beaches. Phew. Their dynamite didn’t even dent you. To frogs, you’re a safe, swampy oaf. They live peaceful on your back with ducks. Following your life cycle along currents, you will go under, one day, soon. Before the end I want to canoe to your spongy body, step on, risk falling through to your scummy underside, rootwork and goo. Nevertheless, I trust in your descent. When the lake takes you, I believe you will still breathe through the leafy tips of your tallest tree.
Please do track down copies of Walsh’s books, as well as the Queer Nature anthology.