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

Beverley Bie Brahic