A Journal (2020) by J.M. Walsh is an experimental account of April 2017 through to the end of March the following year. Each entry, though undated, is identifiable by a very specific constriction: the number of words should match the day in the month. Thus the first day must be a single word, the second day two words, and so on up to the thirty-first day.
What can be conveyed by a single word? The first entry is ‘Bird’, and we’re left to ponder what could be meant by this. Is a real bird being referenced, or something else? An illustration, perhaps. Things remain unclear – each day is new, after all – but more references to birds abound as the month unfolds with mentions of a hawk and a woodpecker, and “Dawn birds full of rumours: / giddy, indiscreet.”
As the months roll on, we start to see glimpses of the author’s life – friends; cats; an interest perhaps in churches; a comfort in music. At one point doubt creeps into the project. (“Is this project faltering? As engagement, it meets its book, but what fails is its soil: what muted emptiness you try to muscle pleasure from—“). This teasing out of a character from behind the often unrelated entries is vaguely reminiscent of David Markson’s Notecard quartet
What we really learn about the writer is his appreciation of the natural world, of being among it and feel the disappointment of a few days’ rain and being stuck indoors (“I have lost my connection to the outer world of nature.”). How the world is processed and presented is enjoyable: Broad beans’ “green skin, slick as eyelids“ and “flung rain” are nicely evocative. That the month of October is spent almost exclusively meditating on a spider and her web (“giant’s fingerprint”) shows that it’s not all random musings; the impressionist mode is cumulative.
Though there’s a steady progression through the year, it’s hard to call it a narrative. But the pleasure is in taking each entry and giving it room for consideration. Not every entry landed with me, but I certainly appreciate those that gave me insights or made me consider the world from a new angle, such as the restlessness of a hand (“At rest— what is it you’re not holding?”) or, having attended an avant-garde gallery (“I spoke to no one yet felt home.”).
Those passages that stir something are mere flashes in the arc of the book’s year. Some are perhaps too personal or too oblique to see the journal unfold easily to an outsider. But it’s an interesting mix of observations and admissions – of nature’s cycle; of human aging, respectively – that looks to multiple modes of expression, be that the poetry where doors “slam gunshot shut”, an impromptu haiku, or , in lines like “music can parse rain”, a ponderable observation.
Each entry, their potential expanding with each day, opens themselves up to this sort of experimentation, keeping things fresh as the journal progresses. And when the end of March approaches, as the experiment comes also to its conclusion, there’s a satisfying few days of reflection that assess the project itself and the spending of time. “Did you enjoy yourself? Walsh asks himself. His reply; “Less than half the time.” Can the same be said by myself? A little more, maybe; just about.