Marrying into the Family

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

At the time of her tragically early death in 1989, Bronwen Wallace had
established herself as one of Canada’s finest contemporary poets. The
current volume is the first separate printing of the collection with
which she made her début; it originally appeared in 1980, bound between
the same covers with Mary di Michele’s Bread and Chocolate.

Wallace tends to get typed as a feminist poet, but this is to do her a
serious disservice. To be sure, she writes about women and women’s
experience but, like any other true poet, her distinction resides not in
her subject matter or gender or political attitudes but in her capacity
to employ words creatively. Conspicuous in all her work is an individual
rhythm that manages to transform seemingly casual phrasing into
memorable speech patterns.

Marrying into the Family is more narrowly focused than her later work.
The emphasis is on photographs and ancestors, the female consciousness
locating herself in her own family and her husband’s family, in a
present dependent upon varied pasts, in the passing moment drifting
inexorably into the frozen, timeless world of the past: “... I search
their faces / for clues messages / find only my own face anticipated /
in the shape of a nose / the process of my own ageing / traced in the
lines around mouth and eyes.”

There is little of the piquant humor that characterized her more mature
work, and less of the distinctive variations of tone, but her gift for
offering the right words in the right order is already developed.
Admirers of the now well-known poems in Signs of Former Tenant, Common
Magic, and The Stubborn Particulars of Grace will recognize the same
assured control of diction and rhythm.