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!

9 June 2025

June, the days still grow longer, for two more weeks. In the Place St Sulpice the antiques market and the painters market will soon yield the space to the poetry market. I’ve been reading a lovely small book by Colm Toibin about Elizabeth Bishop. I actually finished it 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then began over. It makes it own special contribution to the EB literature in its lovely clear simple prose. The chapter I read a couple days ago was about Bishop story called ‘The Scream’ ; it’s a story about her Nova Scotia childhood and the scream is a scream of pain that ‘was not even loud to begin with… . its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.’ My thought was, I think, about Marianne Moore’s Steeple, and then I looked up from my book, and out across the street and my eyes saw the lightning rod on the roof of the church and I flicked it with my fingernail. And now I remember that about a year ago, returning from an errand, I walked along the back ( ‘the holy end’) of the church just as lightning struck and there was a crash of thunder, both together: hitting the lightning rod, I imagined.

I think I’ll take Toibin’s book On Elizabeth Bishop (2015, Princeton UP) back to the Bay Area with me. We fly early tomorrow morning.

Paris, Friday 30 May 2025

We have just returned from several weeks in the shade of the Mont Ventoux, which was lovely and lately sunny , almost midsummer hot. The train ride back was lovely too, carrying us from the blue skies and sun of Avignon over mostly farmland, overcast but green. Reddish-brown, then white cows grazed or hung out in the shade of a single tree, Flat or rolling hills, with the occasional village or stone farm that looked as though life in them had not much changed for centuries, Then Paris. I went to bed listening to street noise and have woken to sun making sharp shadows on the protruberences of the neoclassical church across the street, It is a long weekend. Paris residents will have gone away for the last of May’s long weekends (Ascension Thursday through Sunday). I had to run to the neighbourhood nursing station to get the bandage on an incision on my leg changed, and coming back the rue de l’Odeon was full to the brim with people supping with friends.