BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC lives in Paris. She is the translator of works by Apollinaire, Ponge, Jacques
Roubaud and Hélène Cixous, whose Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint was published by Columbia University Press in 2004. The recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Emerging Writer Grant, her poems have appeared in Ambit, Canadian Literature, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review, PoetryWales, The Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. This is her first collection of poems.
“It never fails to astonish me / how quickly the body knows what it wants,” begins “Never,” from Beverley Bie Brahic’s Against Gravity. Ranging widely in space, from France, where Brahic lives, to Italy, Ireland, California and her native British Columbia, these poems evoke worlds of taste and touch, sounds and smells - flesh and thought - and the inextricable mingling of the two.
Some take animals - a couple of squirrels, elusive herons, deer in an elegy on the death of her father - as their subject; others look at landscapes, still others observe human beings engaged in their diverse activities: schoolboys on the battlefields of the Somme, a pickpocket in the metro, people cooking and eating and making love.
“Luxe, calme et volupté” as Matisse had it, but with a serious edge, and an intelligence that is never to be entirely taken in but can stand at the doorway where luxe and calme and volupté move through history, delicately, at the edge of indulgence, knowing their own edgy yet natural context, full of affection and careful distance. I doubt, in any case, whether we will see a more sensuous book, with as much control as this for a good while, nor one written as lightly,
with as little apparent effort. But that, of course, is the secret.
George Szirtes
Against Gravity is a graceful, sensual, smart and, when you least expect it, a heartbreaking book.
Thomas Lux
