Review of Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh
By Nicholas Skaldetvind
Candace Walsh’s Iridescent Pigeons (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2024) pulses along the spectral tide of memory, braiding the intimate with the mundane, creating a textured meditation on love, familial bonds, and personal reclamation. Her language weaves everyday objects from lemons, dogs, seaweed into a resonant web of at-once connections and separations, echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sensuous attention to form and rhythm: “Glory be to goddesses of heft— / The plush, broad, soft, round, thick.” Walsh’s adroit application of stylistic devices, with an ear keyed for language, illuminates the “sensuous beauty of everyday life” through a lexicon that recalls the lyrical introspection of Woolf’s The Waves and Bishop’s careful rendering of the physical: “I split the lemons crosswise twice, packed salt into the creases, / and stuffed them in the jar until their blood became their brine.”
In the book, Walsh ranges from the cento and Sapphic stanzas to free verse, showing a marriage of form and emotional breadth. This reconciliation of form and freedom allows the collection’s overarching themes to come out more clearly; each poem inhabits spaces of queer eros, domesticity, and the unresolved. In poems like “Bowed Beauty” the lyrical voice works with the corporeal as Walsh channels Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” creating an ode to the fullness and shape of bodies, capturing a feverish excitement that resists society’s prescribed containment: “When we could finally pounce, / how hot it surged, / or hardly stirred—so deeply stilled. / We know how much it costs / to cut it off. I’d rather clean up blood.”
Walsh is also interested in the nuances of transformation. In “Things I Broke,” mundane snafus become metaphors for the complex fractures of interpersonal relationships, as the poem questions how bonds are strengthened or worn by proximity. It’s unflinching and has the power to leave the reader feeling vulnerable.
Walsh’s work demands an active engagement from readers, prompting us to search for new meaning with each reading. Her language, sometimes meandering in its lyricism, sometimes direct, becomes a site for reflection on what it means to love, to mourn, and to reclaim one’s past through the lens of queerness. Each poem provides occasion and invitation to explore protean forms; each poem is iridescent and irrepressible. Ultimately, Candace Walsh’s collection is a resonant contribution to contemporary queer poetry, examining love in its multiplicity—quietly triumphant, at times painful, often unwavering in its beauty.
Nicolas Skaldetvind is a writer who was born in New York.
New Ohio Review 