Some weeks ago, at a book launch at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in the Sixth arrondissement, I was introduced to Victoria Moul, a friend of a friend who thought we might share some interests, notably poetry and translation. Some time later we got together for coffee before she had to pick up a child at the local primary school. Since then I’ve been dipping into Victoria’s online Substack, ‘Horace and Friends,’ and her poetry reviews, on The Friday Poem in particular, but also, in those ‘one thing leads to another’ explorations of the tracks people leave online, other things, including an admirable poem or two on sites I’d never been to before. I think hers is quite an original mind in the one or two poems I’ve seen and in her approach to literary criticism. The texts keep their sheen, the gleams of emotion that prompted her to write them. And they have personality.

It’s late afternoon on a day that began with heavy rain and has turned to blue sky and big white clouds. Street noise: voices, cars and motorcycles and the usual theatre od the absurd at the side entrance to the church across the street. Also I have family in town, so I will just recommend The Friday Poem to anyone who happens to be listening, as well as Victoria’s Substack (Victoria is a classicist and early modern literature specialist with a strong interest in modern poetry, Basil Bunting’s for instance). And now back to cloud-and-pigeon watching, with an eye on a pot of lentil soup, that’s supper.

Beverley Bie Brahic