30 July 2026, Palo Alto

We have been anxiously following the news from France, first the heat waves and now the wildfires. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the weather is same-same: solid blue skies, warm days, overnight fog off the Pacific which works much better than air conditioning to cool our nights. I realise that the weather in our micro-climate (south of San Francisco) is so boringly good it is not worth mentioning. Alas.

I had a funny experience with AI this week. I am working on a new translation whose author quotes a book by Jacques Derrida. I made a draft translation of the paragraph concerned, then looked online for the Derrida book’s translator. My first thought was to search with IA; I asked Gemini to find the translation for me, giving Gemini my draft translation as guidance. IA returned the Derrida book’s translation to me was promptly returned to me, flatteringly much like my draft.

Pleased at having saved myself a lot of searching and maybe even a trip to the university’s Green Library West Stacks (a place one might only be found months later under a musty stack like a dried-out beetle), I asked Gemini to give me a page reference, at which point Gemini started sending me increasingly obviously wrong answers. I got irritated, Gemini apologized increasingly abjectly for wasting my time with made-up answers (as they/it /he disarmingly admitted) to my questions. A bit of this and I started wondering about the translation they had given me — wasn’t it suspiciously close to my draft translation?

Indeed. When I asked Gemini to find the translation she/it/they — what are Gemini’s pronouns?—had simply sent me back my own translation, framed as an answer.

Remind me to tell you some other time about the West Stacks labyrinth.

July 8, 2026, Palo Alto

A whole six months without posting! Six months in Paris, where we suffered under the first, May, heatwave, or ‘Canicule:’ with temperatures in the mid 30s: shutters (where we have them) closed all day, open when the sun sets, hoping cooler air will breeze in. But nighttime cool in the city is not cool enough to help, unlike here near the coast of northern California the temperature drops 20 degrees as soon as the sun goes down and fog rolls in off the Pacific. The fog may hang around until late morning, but seldom for the whole day. I watched it roll in last evening, down the coastal hills and along the bay. It looks like a long train entering slowly and deliberately entering a station.

‘Canicule’ is the French word for very hot weather. It’s been around for several centuries, my dictionary tells me, and refers to the ‘dog days’ or the period of great heat when the dog star rises and sets with the sun. ‘Par la fenêtre ouverte de ma chambre de torture, pénètre la chaleur lourde, pâteuse, écrasante, d'une matinée de canicule’ is one of the examples drawn from French literature and dated 1898. But I don’t believe it was ever as hot before this year.

A new episode of the ‘canicule’ has just begun in France.

Palo Alto, 20 November, 2025

Just to announce that Victoria Moul has written a wonderfully witty review of my new collection Apple Thieves (Carcanet 2024) for The New Review. It has just appeared in their 11 November Newsletter:

Review of the week:

Ants and honey bees and bears

Beverley Brie Brahic is well known as a translator from French, both poetry and prose. I am always irritated by those who talk about ‘translations’ vs ‘original poems’, feeling grumpily that anybody who insists on such a distinction knows nothing much about either. All the same, I bought Bie Brahic’s 2018 collection The Hotel Eden on the strength of its delicious translations of Baudelaire, so accurately at once lush and evasive in their extravagance. Here is the start of ‘Autumn Song’:

Now we will plunge into the cold shadows;
So long, dancing light of our short summers!
Already I hear the funereal blows
Of firewood ricocheting off the cobbles.

I came for the translations, but I stayed for the ‘originals’ (shudder). There’s much less translation and imitation in Apple Thieves, her latest collection, than there was in The Hotel Eden, but more variety of another kind. Apple Thieves suggests a whole life, in all its moods and phases, matched by an understated level of technical accomplishment. If you want to write well about many different occasions, you need many different forms and styles in which to do it.

One of the things I like most about Bie Brahic’s poetry is its humour: she is an adult speaking to other adults about the silliness of the world. No hint of the long-drawn-out solemnity of post-adolescence which seems to be the default register of much (too much) poetry in English. I was particularly amused by one poem beginning ‘Oh it’s draining poorly this shower!’ She’s also very good at poems full of erotic suggestion: an unusual trait in an Anglophone poet, perhaps learnt in part from all that French translation.

If there is a characteristic feature it is the dying fall. Many of her poems end with a metrical irregularity, a break in the rhyme scheme, or a rhetorical side-step, as here in ‘Little Song for Michel’, in which the final stanza is the least regular:

A puff of wind
Will tickle the skin of a summer day
And one white cloud
May turn things hazy

Or here at the end of ‘Paradise’:

We humans in our shelters are
Susceptible to flood and fire,
As apt to perish in our lairs
As ants and honey bees and bears –

Echo (faint)

As ants and honey bees and bears.
As ants and honey bees and bears.

She doesn’t draw the moral. I admit I have a fondness for poets who are brave enough to risk the resounding conclusion and sometimes I feel a bit frustrated by the end of these poems. I want more of the clickety-clunk of a form coming home. But this is part of the point (and sometimes the sexiness) of her poems – to leave that to you. I think she is just more grown-up than me. VM

Palo Alto, Friday 12 September 2025

Here in Palo Alto we live on the edge of a creek (dry since the spring) that is the boundary between two towns south of San Francisco, and tree-lined so that we look at what seems to be a forest, but is really a thin screen of green with houses, apartment buildings and businesses cheek-to-cheek on each side. Why do I mention that? Because straight across from us, a leaf blower has started chasing leaves around the parking lot of the building.

Really what I set out to say is how excited I was to receive a copy of Andrew Sclater’s collection Quite Joyful from Mariscat in Scotland. It is a pamphlet (chapbook) and every poem in it is strange and wonderful and playful and deeply serious. I can’t praise it highly enough. I was so thrilled that I sat down and read it straight through, all 30 or so pages in one — well, maybe 2 — gulps. I’m Canadian, we’re pretty low key, but this book makes me jump up and down inside me. I want to shout to everyone I know or don’t know. I think there is going to be at least one launch reading in Paris, where Andrew lives part of the time, before December, perhaps at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in the 6th arrondissement.

Palo Alto, Tuesday 12 August 2025

Another coolish, sunny afternoon in Northern California. Yesterday biking, today gym, everyday, in the morning, writing, translating. I’ve been slogging away at some prose texts (poems) by a contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli. I discovered Magrelli by reading a selection of his poems by a British poet Jamie McKendrick (Faber), really fine translations that made me want to read more of Magrelli (and McKendrick). I began with a recent collection of poems called Exfanzia, then switched to the prose called In the Flesh Condominium, as backup. I’m gradually getting it, but it’s not easy. I’ve fallen back on Baudelaire as relief, a poem called ‘The Giantess’ (La Géante’) ‘recited’ by Matisse in a book I was reading, a favourite of Matisse, apparently. It’s lovely, I hope I can get it word and tone-perfect.

I’m also trying to do that with a couple of my own poem drafts, over and over, in each case a stanza that won’t come right (of course I come back to them after not having worked on them for a while, and nothing will seem right).

So I’m going to the gym and maybe a yoga class to think of something else. A book back to the library, perhaps another one I want to borrow, though I have it online for 3 weeks (after being on the waiting list for it for months) from the northern California public library. I think it’s a book I want my own copy of.

Oh, and an update on the hungry bluejay. We keep putting out bread and he comes back and stands on the balcony railing and squawks, and I hop up from whatever I’m doing and talk to him and if all the bread cubes are gone, I tell him/her to wait while I get some more. He is becoming less wary. Then he squawks (thank you?) and flies off.

Palo Alto, 11 July 2025

A week or so ago, I shook half a package of musty, slivered almonds onto the pots of succulents (the only kind of plant that weathers a half year with scant attention) that we’ve been reviving from their winter hibernation on the balcony (deck). And a blue jay came along, squawked, pecked, squawked, pecked. This went on for four or five mornings, the sole visitor, and then the slivers of almonds were all gone. But the jay, the same or another, kept turning up, only now he or she squawked louder and louder and began tossing the dried moss and dirt around. I got a broom and swept up the mess and moved the plant, another survivor, inside behind the glass doors. The jay came back and stood squawking at the plant through window. The jay’s a fast learner: he barely passed by this morning, though the pot is back outside.

Someone mentioned a big book by Aragon about Matisse on this blog a few days ago. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow it from the university: Matisse, un Roman. I’m 2/3 of the way through Volume 1, and it is one of those books you’d love to have at home just to glance at it and remember reading it. It’s not a traditional art book; it is a collection of articles, thoughts, messages from Matisse to Aragon during the war when they were both living in the south of France, in ‘the unoccupied zone.’ A kind of album of paintings and essays. Aragon, a communist, was on the run. Matisse would write him messages about the text Aragon was preparing, a text which seems to have just kept swelling. I’ve just read a chapter, written after the war, when Aragon was looking for an account of all the ‘props’ Matisse used in his paintings: chairs, hangings, pots… I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like it.

The news is so desolating: another raid yesterday on farmworkers down south. And the rest.

California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025

‘The weather here is boring,’ my husband said yesterday as another cool blue morning dawned out the windows of our north-facing, therefore cool, apartment. There was a rising intonation in his voice, as if this were a question (6 months of blue skies?) We’d been hearing about the storm in Paris this past week, and the ‘canicule’.

Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.

I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.

It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.

We are going to San Francisco this afternoon to see the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honour, another of those joy-of-life artists, like Matisse and Hockney.

Monday 9 June

This is a PS to my earlier post. For some reason I was thinking about the poet A E Housman — no, I remember why; it was because when I was scrolling through Instagram yesterday, I came upon Judy Dench reciting ‘Loveliest of Trees,’ school-girlishly, then with her mischievous smile. I was pleased that I could still recite it along with her.

It came to me that ‘Loveliest of Trees’ must have helped inspire Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening,’ but to what a enormous difference of tone. Housman’s being pure reason (and joy) and Frost’s poem very dark, as every reader, even a schoolchild must intuitively understand, without the help of Joseph Brodsky’s brilliant essay. I also read Housman’s ‘Shropshire Lad XXX’’ and notice that he speaks of ‘fire and ice,’ not perhaps coincidently the title of another Frost poem: “Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice…’

This naive discovery exemplified for me the difference between Romanticism and Classicism. Duh!