Maria Wallace – Particles of Thought

Profile Maria Wallace Live Encounters Magazine May 2017Download PDF Here

Particles of Thought, poems by Maria Wallace

Maria Wallace was born in Catalonia, but lived her teenage years in Chile. Later she married and settled in Dublin. She drew and painted all her life, though also took up the challenge of writing in a language not her own as a way to relieve some of the friction caused by her divided loyalties.

In 1996 she founded Virginia House Creative Writers, a groups she still facilitates today. She has edited four anthologies of their work, the last one, to be launched in a couple of months, is a celebration to their twenty years existence.

She has a BA in English and Spanish Literature, 2004, an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature, 2005. She has won many national and international poetry prizes, amongst them The Sunday Tribune Hennessy Literary Awards, 2006. Her work has been published in Ireland, England, Italy, Australia and Catalonia. In 2015 she participated in the ISLA Festival, a gathering of writers from Ireland, Spain, and Latin America.

In 2010 she published ‘Second shadow’ and in 2014 ‘The blue of distance’, two bilingual poetry collections (English – Catalan) both her own work and both from Catalan publishing houses. She is the yearly judge of The Jonathan Swift Awards.


Where I was born

My family is spread out all over the world,
in different countries,
above, below,
under the soil,
in poems, in pictures.

The trees outside
are getting ready
for their summer display of figs,
almonds, walnuts and apples,
but they don’t recognise me anymore
as all the echoes are too distant
to be heard or understood,
and my days here are heaped under
other peoples’ days.

I am a stranger in the house
where I was born.


Liquid breath

The youthful green of spring
was long gone.
She raked the leaves from the lawn
to the further corner of the garden,
piled them under the naked rowan tree.

In the cold, dimming light,
she heard a calling in the mist
creeping from the lake,
in the insistent swish
of wavelets on the shore.

She had heard it before, but today
understood the words,
and in her understanding
glimpsed a figure;

sure it was him risen from the water,
she walked into it.
Her steps never faltered
till her breath became
liquid like his breath.


Particles of thought

His smile reminds me
of something
I no longer remember;
and I feel lost,
float in the infinite
skies of mind
trying to connect with
particles of thought
that might still carry
the code
of what I no longer remember.


 © Maria Wallace

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