Apple Thieves, online Launch, 4 September

Apple Thieves
by Beverley Bie Brahic
Online Book Launch
19:00, Wednesday 4 September 2024

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Apple Thieves by Beverley Bie Brahic. The reading will be hosted by Katie Peterson. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing. 

'Bie Brahic writes with singular, and non-sentimental, brilliance.'
Ian Pople

Get tickets

'I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms,' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell - 'an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely' - collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in 'Root Vegetables'. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris - 'Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction' - 'time-hedged cottages' and the earthbound in all its fragility.

'In her original poems, [Beverley Bie Brahic] characteristically moves towards compassionate celebration. Both the short lyrics and the more discursive narratives in her collections are richly and variously peopled, and the Mediterranean glow of generous physicality extends to fruits, flowers and an abundant natural world.'
Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Why?

A remnant of blood orange moon
Smiles over the Dentelles at dusk:
Mona Lisa
Musing over the cryptic world,
And so much breath in this old mill house
Morning blurs the line of hills,
Roundnesses of belly and thigh.

We waken to the song of you
Trying new words in old questions:
Why a great grandma’s manger scene,
Chipped shepherds and tinfoil stream?
Why the bunch of olive branches
Last winter’s olives still adorn?
Welcome to the Age of Questions.

from

Get tickets

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic grew up in Vancouver; today she lives in France. Apple Thieves is her fifth collection of poetry after Catch and Release, winner of the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize; The Hotel Eden; The Hunting of the Boar, a 2016 PBS Recommendation; White Sheets, a 2013 Forward Prize finalist for Best Collection and PBS Recommendation; and Against Gravity. Her many translations include books by Yves Bonnefoy, Helene Cixous, and Charles Baudelaire; The Little Auto, her selection of Guillaume Apollinaire's First World War poems, was awarded the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize; Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, was a finalist for the 2009 Popescu Translation Prize. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts Writing Grant and fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke, published by FSG in 2024. Her previous collections include Life in a Field, the winner of the Omnidawn Open Books Prize (2021), A Piece of Good News, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and The Accounts (2013), winner of the RIlke Prize from the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared widely in journals including the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Poetry London, and Raritan. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis, where she is Professor of English and a Chancellor's Fellow. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she will be a Visiting Fellow at St. Edmund's Hall, Oxford University. 

Find all of Carcanet's online and in-person event listings on our website here.

Sign up to our weekly newsletter to receive a poem, plus information on Carcanet books and authors, including forthcoming titles, events news, reviews, interviews and updates.

Wednesday 10 July 2024

I am sitting in that unsettled state of a traveller ready an hour early to depart, in my case for Roissy airport, to catch a flight to San Francisco. Bags, closed but unzipped or open, waiting for the last minute item surround me. I am still in my nightgown, clothes laid out on the bed. The window is open, shutters still open. What have I forgotten? Nothing, I think, though I could easily be wrong given the rather haphazard nature of my packing yesterday. The plane takes off at 4pm and arrives in San Francisco around 6 pm. Here it is cool and grey, another thunderstorm perhaps brewing like the one that hit the lightening rod of the church across the street and made me jump — I was coming home from a last minute errand, hurrying because the drops had begun to thicken, and when I was still a block from home, then it poured down; I sheltered under an overhang of the altar end of the church, and crackle bang! the lightening hit. Also, military planes were flying low over the city at about the same moment, practicing for Bastille Day on the 14th.

I am travelling with 20 copies of my new collection Apple Thieves (Carcanet, UK), not officially published till August 29, but in print and on websites, including Carcanet’s I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to read past the first section. I need to gauge my mood before I continue reading, one section at a time. I am sorry to leave Paris. But then, once I’m in California, where I have family, I’ll be glad to be there.

I hear a rustle like rain beginning, the silence.

Paris, same day new post

I wasn’t able to load the back page of Apple Thieves on my earlier post, so I’ll do it here, at the end of the same day. I’m sitting in my 4th floor window, feet up on the window ledge, in my Ikea rocker (4 stars for comfort) looking out at the church and reading Murakami’s What I think about when I think about running — which I recommend — and something he said makes me think of something I keep thinking: that is, how good it feels when you share a moment with a total stranger. Once, can’t remember which book that was, but in it I wrote a poem about something funny that happened in the metro between 2 teenage girls who were talking so much they almost missed their stop. I was smiling to myself and I looked up and caught the eye of the guy across the aisle, and we both laughed out loud. It happens pretty often and it always feel good: on a bus there’s an incident and you know the woman opposite you is feeling exactly what you do and your eyes catch.

Anyhow I’m going to try and upload the back cover of my new book, with the description and the extracts from reviews and hope it is of interest to someone. Then it’s going to be time for dinner. The sky is full of fluffy clouds, hardly any downpours today.

Paris, 30 May 2024

Well, after lots of back-and-forthing I have a front and back cover for Apple Thieves, publication date August 31 of this year, a date that I can feel creeping up. I’m going to try and load images of the covers…

In the Vaucluse, Saturday 11 May 2024

Still living the country life. For the past three days, the weather has been sparkling and the land is covered and scented with broom, in addition to the modest wildflowers at the level of the roadside, where I mostly look when I am climbing a hill on my bike. It’s not that the landscape isn’t spectacular - the Dentelles de Montmirail to the west and to the east, the Mont Ventoux.

Yesterday was a rest day, and our neighbour, Paul, thought it was a good day to show us his attic again, especially the crib his father made for him 94+ years ago and a toy wheelbarrow, both cobwebbed and dusty and wormy, but bursting with memories he was happy to share. (Paul is an important person in my new book Apple Thieves coming out in August). My daughter is expecting a baby later this year, and the cradle is for him, though I don’t quite picture her sitting by an open hearth by lantern light, rocking it with her foot, much as I like the idea of it. But first it needs to be dewormed. At the moment both cradle and wheelbarrow are sitting in the yard.

Paris, 20 April 2024

Our two suitcases stand at the front door, waiting to head for the Vaucluse. One hour now, all the packing and dishwashing, and making sure the fridge has been cleaned of anything that would go bad, before we catch Bus 63 for the Gare de Lyon. Paris has a wonderful public transportation, the Metro, of course, though since Covid we have more often taken one of the many buses in all directions more or less on our doorstop - unless our destination is within walking distance, a vast circle that includes much of the centre of Paris from Peter Brooks’ Bouffes du Nord’ to the Gobelin tapestry museum in the 13th.

Yesterday, for instance, I though I’d walk to the Tuileries to check on the plot of land on the river side of the Garden to see how one of my favourite sculpure sites was doing in this season: a very lifelike fallen log (in bronze) lying across a rectangular section of ground planted with ‘undergrowth,’ as if the meticulous Tuileries had been transformed into a suburban wood - for what? 50? 100 paces? You don’t walk through it - this is not bit of forest but a simulacrum. You can, however, sit on a bench and admire it. Which I do. Before turning and returning home through the Tuileries’ lesson in mostly plane geometry.

I am betraying my Canadian northwest childhood when I say that my preferred part of the Luxembourg Garden is the southwest quadrant, designed (very much designed) as a Jardin Englais, an English Garden, whose conceit is again, natural park- and woodland, topped by a very old orchard, meticulously maintained. There are even a couple of redwoods and some Wordsworthian daffodils, recently in bloom. Lawns you can’t walk - or, God forbid, sit on. Still I have grown to like their peacefulness, a little like a pool of green. And I’ve never heard the noise of a leaf blower, though I’ve seen gardeners (lucky them) with string and special clippers trimming the edges.

May I add that The New Criterion for this month of April has one of my Leopardi translations, ‘The Calm after the Storm,’ with its wonderful evocation of the life in an Italian village after a passing downpour which sent all the village’s inhabitants scuttling for shelter.

Paris, Thursday 4 April 2004

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.

Paris, Wednesday 20 March 2024

I’ve been reading Louis MacNiece, revelling in it once more. A friend’s comment on a poem sent me back to ‘Snow’ and from there to others, found in various online sites, including the wonderful, British Poetry Archive with its recordings of poets reading their poems, which has several MacNiece poems. The friend who set me off on this quest also sent me ‘Soap Suds,’ which I had never read: https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/lm-soap.htm.

A sunny Paris morning with street noise: a woman on her phone, a one-sided bit of a conversation, delivery vans stopping and starting, one street over a siren passing, fading. I am proofreading the manuscript for my book Apple Thieves, last minute changes, trying to decide whether to delete or keep the poem I’m working on.

Gym after lunch, window shopping on my way at Compagnie, a book shop I love across from the Sorbonne, a few steps from the statue of Montaigne, whose bronze foot in its soft-looking bronze slippers is well-polished by passersby.