Bronwen Wallace
1945-1989

BIOGRAPHY

Brownwen Wallace was born in 1945 in Kingston, Ontario. She earned both her BA and her MA at Queen's University in the 1960s. Upon graduation, she moved to Windsor, where she founded a women’s bookstore, and worked with women’s groups. Returning to Kingston in the late 1970s, Wallace continued her volunteer work with women’s groups, and began to teach courses in both women’s studies and creative writing. Her first collection of poetry, Marrying into the Family, was published in 1980, and was printed and bound together with Mary di Michele's Bread and Chocolate. She published three more collections of poetry over the next seven years: Signs of the Former Tenant (1983), Common Magic (1985), and The Stubborn Particulars of Grace (1987). A collection of her short stories, People You’d Trust Your Life To, was published posthumously in 1990. Wallace died of cancer in 1989. Since this time, the Bronwen Wallace Award has been established, awarded each year to a young poet or short fiction writer who is not yet published, and who is under the age of 35.

The below poem, titled, The Woman in this Poem, by Bronwen Wallace, was copied from An Anthology Of Canadian Literature In English, revised version, 1996.

The book was a gift from fellow Ottawa poet and close friend, Bonnie Adams. Bonnie has sometimes teased me about how little I read, which is partially true when compared to her and some others I know, who have an amazing ability to devour entire libraries in a short period of time. I do read, but mostly poetry, and in short spurts, including friends' work at my main Internet hangout, Pathetic.org. The truth of the matter is that I have a short attention span, and when coupled with shortages of time and energy due to life's other responsibilities, anything longer than a poem like a short story or novel has to really capture my interest in order for me to take the time to read it.

In any case, here's to you Bonnie for the friendly prods, and a genuine expression of thanks for the gift of the above mentioned anthology. I look forward to dipping into it again and again in the coming months.

What impressed me about The Woman in this Poem, is its brilliant capture of the downside and challenges of domestic life. I found the piece to be both haunting and disturbing, while at the same time intellectually captivating in its brutal honesty, and feel confident that Wallace would approve of my bringing it once more into the open.

The Woman In This Poem
by Bronwen Wallace, 1987

The woman in this poem
lives in the suburbs
with her husband and two children
each day she waits for the mail and
once a week receives
a letter from her lover
who lives in another city
writes of roses warm patches
of sunlight on his bed
Come to me he pleads
I need you and the woman
reaches for the phone
to dial the airport
she will leave this afternoon
her suitcase packed
with a few light clothes

But as she is dialing
the woman in this poem
remembers the pot-roast
and that fact that it is Thursday
she thinks of how her husband's face
will look when he reads her note
his body curling sadly toward
the empty side of the bed

She stops dialing and begins
to chop onions for the pot roast
but behind her back the phone
shapes itself insistently
the number for airline reservations
chants in her head
in an hour her children will be
home from school and after that
her husband will arrive
to kiss the back of her neck
while she thickens the gravy
and she knows that
all through dinner
her mouth will laugh and chatter
while she walks with her lover
on a beach somewhere

She puts the onions in the pot
and turns toward the phone
but even as she reaches
she is thinking of
her daughter's piano lessons
her son's dental appointment

Her arms fall to her side
and as she stands there
in the middle of her spotless kitchen
we can see her growing
old like this
and wish for something anything
to happen we could have her go
mad perhaps and lock herself
in the closet crouch there
for days her dresses withering
around her like cast-off skins
or maybe she could take
to cruising the streets at night
in her husband's car
picking up teenage boys
and fucking them in the back seat
we can even imagine
finding her body
dumped in a ditch somewhere
on the edge of town

The woman in this poem offends us
with her useless phone and the persistent
smell of onions we regard her as we do
the poorly calculated overdose
who lies in bed somewhere
not knowing how her life drips
though her drop by measured drop
we want to think of death
as something sudden
stroke or the leap
that carries us over the railing
of the bridge in one determined arc
the pistol aimed precisely
at the right part of the brain
we want to hate this woman

but mostly we hate knowing
that for us too it is
moments like this
our thoughts stiff fingers
tear at again and again
when we stop in the middle
of an ordinary day and
like the woman in this poem
begin to feel
our own deaths
rising slow within us