Throughout Catherine Walsh's work, innovations of form challenge the stability of temporal perspectives and subjective positions. Though this is a familiar dynamic in contemporary avant-garde poetry, the stylistic experimentation that Walsh practises grows directly from her particular enquiry into the nature of being, and the limits of human understanding. What Michael Begnal has described as the ‘scientific’ character of Walsh's work, is borne out by the absence of a clearly located self in the work, a strategy which, together with constant shifts in vocabulary and tone, problematizes the role of the singular speaker in this environment and further indicates the impossibility of such stability in any context. This radical reconfiguration of subjectivity has implications for how the past may be understood and represented in poetry. By altering the formal and linguistic structures of the poem, Walsh challenges the linearity of thought, redefining how past and present operate in the reading mind. Yet this strategy does not merely reprise larger assumptions concerning forms of postmodern identity, instead the tension between lived experience and existential questioning pulls the normal registers of language apart, giving rise to particular complexities of rhythm and tone. These innovations of form and technique fundamentally alter the relationship between past and present in the work, eliding the boundaries between them in more radical ways than other texts. For Walsh, this adjusted temporality has an impact too on how space is conceived, so that cultural as well as poetic spaces must be seen from new perspectives. This has important implications for the ways in which cultural memory is shaped by political and linguistic environments:

The dismantling of subjectivity, and the formal and linguistic impact of this, is an important preoccupation of contemporary poetry, as the exploration of Medbh McGuckian's work has demonstrated. The problems of unitary subjectivity are not always expressed in formally innovative ways, however…