Wanting Life To Be Like A Story

In a review of Bronwen Wallace's Collected Poems, Anita Lahey digs into the late poet's legacy:

I first encountered Wallace’s poetry in 2000, through a gift of her second book, Signs of the Former Tenant. I was hypnotized by the evening light in “Red Light, Green Light,” the book’s opening poem, how it “seemed to round and soften” the day’s heat and “gathered the sounds” of the children playing into itself. I loved how the narrator in “I Like to Believe My Life” wanted her life to be like a story, “slowly tidying itself.” I moved on to other books, other poems, such as “Coming Through” (from her third volume, Common Magic),with its equating of a friend to a “country,” which sets up the moving metaphor that the loss of such a friend can lead one into a kind of exile. I feel at home amid her juxtaposition of indoors and outdoors, her homely streetscapes, her ever-present neighbours and gathering friends. But it isn’t nostalgia that ties me to these poems any more than it was nostalgia that propelled Wallace. Instead, as one reviewer wrote in 1989, Wallace was drawn to “the violent intrusions that disturb the surface of everyday life.”