Everything Leads to Something Else

Rowland Bagnall explores Beverley Bie Brahic’s “Apple Thieves.”

By Rowland BagnallNovember 6, 2024

• Poetry

TOWARD THE HEART of Apple Thieves, a new collection from Canadian poet and translator Beverley Bie Brahic, is a slim poem called “Exoskeleton.” With microscopic clarity, Brahic describes the contours of a sea snail, conducting a forensic examination of the “chalky shell” before our eyes:

Trace the elegant

Mathematical spirals,
Slip into the
Voluptuous interior

Of this empty house
A nudge will set rocking
Almost indefinitely.

“Exoskeleton” is typical of Brahic’s controlled acts of attention, her painterly precision, recording slow moments of passing time. There is “no detail too small” for her, to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop, a steady influence on Brahic’s rendering of “the untidy world at large,” as she describes it in The Hotel Eden (2018). At times, Brahic’s writing seems to conjure scenes and objects into something like a graspable reality. “I can balance it / On the palm of my hand,” she writes of the snail shell, as though a force resembling Keats’s “living hand” might somehow reach beyond the pages of the poem and pass the shell to us directly: “[S]ee here it is— / I hold it towards you.”

Apple Thieves is filled with such tangible details, from the blackberry clafoutis presented “hot / Directly from the oven” (“Blackberry Clafoutis”) to the “patch of yellow sun” that warms the poet’s “condo deck after breakfast / And by degrees shifts from left to right” (“Woolgathering”), inching steadily toward us. In “The Kumasi Bus,” which recalls a period “living in Ghana,” Brahic animates the “tastes, feel, colour, smell, [and] voices” of a village market, drumming up “gold-tipped pineapples” and “silken mangoes,” which, again, “weigh on the palm of [her] hand.” For Brahic, these details are solid, still within reach, as though gathered and arranged by hand, neatly boxed up in the poem’s stanzas. “I realize that often I’m just writing to celebrate some small experience,” she suggested to Suzannah V. Evans in a 2020 interview, “to get a moment on the page so that somebody reading it can relate to it and perhaps […] relive that moment and feel for it what I felt for it.” Indeed, The Hotel Eden—Brahic’s previous collection—takes its title from a work by the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, whose celebrated boxes are constructed from everyday curated objects, “Fragments of a life,” writes Brahic in that book’s title poem, “protected under glass.”

Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of Octavio Paz’s poem honoring Cornell—“Objects & Apparitions”—appears in her collection Geography III (1976). In it, Bishop interprets Paz describing the artworks as “monuments to every moment,” a phrase that never seems too far from Brahic’s poems. Reading Apple Thieves brings to mind another slice of Bishop’s writing, an essay on the artist-cum-paleontologist Wesley Wehr. Having described his “small-scale” landscape paintings, Bishop continues:

Mr. Wehr is also a collector of agates, of all kinds of stones, pebbles, semi-precious jewels, fossilized clams with opals adhering to them, bits of amber, shells, examples of hand-writing, illegible signatures—those small things that are occasionally capable of overwhelming with a chilling sensation of time and space.

While Brahic’s writing, too, expresses something of the spirit of the collector, it is Bishop’s closing line about the tangibility of Wehr’s artworks that seems particularly prescient. “Who does not feel a sense of release, of calm and quiet,” she asks, “in looking at these little pieces of our vast and ancient world that one can actually hold in the palm of one’s hand?” For Bishop, Wehr’s paintings are “little pieces” of the world itself, conveying something of the actual, just as “the knife recalls the flint flakes” it is knapped from, as Brahic suggests in The Hotel Eden, or as the “flint nodule” in turn “dreams the chalk cliff” to which it once belonged. In the same way, Wehr’s images and Brahic’s poems—and the “semi-precious” fragments they relate—are “flakes” chipped from the world at large, still carrying its properties. Similarly, the “subtleties of mouth-feel and touch” are borne by the bright apples in “Apple Thieves,” another poem in which the objects under scrutiny appear to end up in a pair of hands: “In September, when the apples ripen, / Passers-by are welcome to pick them.”

“There is nothing flashy here, nothing overwritten,” writes Brahic of Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic (2008), “yet right away the details illuminate a world.” Brahic’s poems are nothing if not illuminating, each “an attic splashed with sunlight” (“The Unmade Bed”), a record of the poet’s focused, microscopic gaze. (“I would like to have had her quiddity,” wrote Mary McCarthy of Bishop, “her way of seeing that was like a big pocket magnifying glass.”) These poems magnify the objects, scenes, and landscapes they describe, reminding one how extraordinary the ordinary can be: the “quicksilver squirrels” (“More Squirrels”); a sudden flash of honeybees, “swimming in the almond tree flowers” (“Next to Nothing”); nature’s “small acts of propitiation” (“Camouflage”). Nevertheless, Brahic successfully avoids the trap of making more of things than they really are, presenting “nothing supermarket flawless, nothing imperishable,” as she puts it in “Apple Thieves,” happy to take the world as it appears, to witness “just / what’s here,” to quote the closing lines of “Solstice,” from her second collection, White Sheets (2012). “It seems a miracle,” writes Hayden Carruth in his plainspoken “Birthday Cake,” another poem content to take things as it finds them; this is “not mystical, nothing occult, / just the ordinary improbability that occurs / over and over, the stupendousness / of life.” Brahic’s new collection ends with a calligram—“Monarch”—likely rooted in the writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, whose work she has translated (see 2012’s The Little Auto). Rendered in a facsimile reproduction, recording the real-time loops of Brahic’s handwriting, the poem captures a moment of such “ordinary improbability,” encapsulating something of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality of Brahic’s interactions with the world. The poem begins: “Hey there, gorgeous / You with the flame-coloured wings / Dodging rush hour traffic.” The description leaves a visual trace of the encounter in its wake, the insect captured (literally) in language.

While Brahic’s writing celebrates the ordinary—in “praise of the earthbound,” as she suggested to Victoria Modi-Celda—the nature of her poetics is more complex than it first appears. “I try to discover and write the truth as I understand it at a given moment,” she stated in the same interview. And yet, there’s something not quite real about the “given moments” of these poems, which seem to stretch and elongate their very temporalities. This sense of expansion, of time seeping beyond itself, stems—at least in part—from Brahic’s interest in the visual arts, particularly painting: ekphrastic poems and allusions to specific artworks have been a feature of her writing since her debut, Against Gravity (2005). Time slows down in many paintings, almost (“not quite”) to a standstill, expressing both a glimpse—a snapshot of the painted moment—and the accumulated hours spent working on the image’s surface; whatever else they show us, all paintings depict the time it took someone to paint them.

In “A Jar of Apricots after Chardin,” from Hunting the Boar (2016), Brahic seems to relish the competing time frames present within Chardin’s 1758 painting, an oval still life of a table “chock-full of objects” that seem at once random and highly curated: cups and glasses, hunks of bread, a knife, an untouched wheel of cheese, a package neatly tied with string; the centerpiece (though just off-center) is a jar of preserved apricots. Like many 18th-century still lifes, the painting signals something about freshness and decay, as evidenced not only by the perishables—the staling bread, the piece of fruit on the table—but also by the various modes of life-extension on display: the cheese, the wine, the apricots submerged in syrup. Already, this is a painting in which time is being stretched and spun, even before we catch sight of the steam emerging from the nearer teacup, as though “the woman has stepped out for a moment: / to fetch the missing ingredient,” Brahic imagines. “The mystery of her absence is compounded // by the pair of wine glasses: one barely touched / while behind it and darker / like a mirror image, the second is drained.” Brahic lingers over the unresolved—and unresolvable—narrative suggestions of the painting, making the most of its uncanny doubles, as though time’s duration in the picture had been doubled by an invisible mirror. Stranger still, we seem to witness two “given moments” layered over one another, minutes apart, as if the two glasses and cups were individual objects painted twice in the same picture: once when full of wine and steaming, once when empty and gone cold.

Brahic’s poem about the painting leans into these ambiguities, itself a kind of mirror, (“not quite”) recreating the painting in words, (re)doubling the scene. What’s more, the poem slows the moment of the painting by extending its duration to the length of a meandering, unhurried sonnet. Elizabeth Bishop seems near at hand again, by way of John Ashbery, who writes about her poems in connection to the work of Kurt Schwitters and Robert Motherwell. Bishop’s poetry, for Ashbery, offers up a landscape “where in a sense everything is ordinary, [where] everything happens in a perpetual present which is a collage of objects and our impressions of them.” Like her poem written in response to Jar of Apricots, Brahic’s work in Apple Thieves reveals her sense of elongating time, where “every nuance of the light” (“Newcomers”) appears to linger longer than it should, time pooling like water “draining poorly” from a shower (“Mythologies”). I’m reminded of another painting—Two Plants (1977–80) by the British artist Lucian Freud. Completed over several years, the work appears to be a still life showing licorice and aspidistra. On closer inspection, we discover that the painting captures three years in a single frame, recording the movement, growth, and decay of the plants, a length of concentrated time.

While Brahic is a poet who takes her time to observe—slow in her looking, sure in her descriptions—the moments detailed by her poems are stretched, also, by memory. It’s easy to imagine how the COVID-19 pandemic’s periods of quarantine—time shuddered to an unexpected halt—might have influenced this quality of Brahic’s poems, not only their distorted temporalities but also their renewed interest in paying close attention to the world at hand: “Little leaf so frail, / Where are you off to?” (“Imitation”). For many years, Brahic has been active on her blog, where evidence of her attentiveness to the quotidian, to “the ordinary improbability that occurs / over and over,” is perhaps most clearly on display. Brahic’s blog posts are reminiscent, to my mind, of the diaries of James Schuyler, in which we find ourselves “in the presence of something that is about to be poetry,” as Nathan Kernan writes, “or, looking again, perhaps [already] is.” Reading Brahic’s poems, however, we find her acts of painterly attention interrupted by a steady stream of memories and associations, semi-distracted, open to the mind’s intrusions. “Memories,” she writes in “Inland Passage,” a poem in which a coastal landscape seems to give way to remembered snapshots of the poet’s mother (or grandmother): “[T]hey’re like one of those / Roly-poly toy clowns / You thwack and you thwack / But they won’t stay down.”

“Woolgathering,” another poem prompted (not coincidentally) by Chardin—this time A Lady Taking Tea (1735)—appears to dramatize the interaction between attention and distractibility. The poem begins with a description of morning sunlight on the deck, the poet working with “an empty flower pot / Upended for a footstool,” ready with her “laptop, book, / And mug of Instant steaming.” That very word—“steaming”—seems enough to prompt a memory of the painting (although it could be in the book she’s reading) in which Brahic imagines Chardin’s woman “woolgathering at a table,” the titular verb carrying its own associations with remembering and daydreams. The poem snaps back to the present—the return of a blue jay—before again tilting away toward a memory of “yesterday,” an interaction with the poet’s neighbor: he is “seated with his eyes closed,” enjoying the feel of the sun on his skin, she writes, “in the chair I leave at our front door.” It’s a curious poem, one that seems to have a built-in sense of its own strangeness, its drifts from one place to another, “woolgathering” itself. “Poems begin in the familiar and veer towards the strange,” writes Brahic in a review of Andrew Elliott’s Mortality Rate (2013): “Reading, one is nudged through a looking glass, usually unawares, until at some point, which may be the end of the poem […] one looks up and asks, ‘Where am I?’ and ‘How did I get here from there?’”

This is certainly true of the poem in question, which ends on a peculiar (deliberately flat?) note, a kind of shrug or anticlimax. “I wanted this to happen in a second / on the page,” suggests a poem from Hunting the Boar, “But the mind keeps thinking other things.” “Everything leads to something else,” Brahic writes in an essay on the process of translation. “This is the kind of amplification and qualification that explains how Tristram Shandy took so long to be born,” she continues, “how Proust burrows into his childhood and resurfaces a lifetime later.”

Brahic’s poetry can be uneven, even “worm-holed, lopsided,” to lift another phrase from “Apple Thieves.” Some of the poems lose their focus, and the reader’s focus with them. The diaristic poems here, charting the wayward time of “these quarantine days”—“Messages from the Valcluse,” “Like the Ancient Greeks Who Measured Their Wealth in Olive Trees”— occasionally drift as Brahic wanders “from garden to house,” observing both “the fig trees […] producing fruit / And the jam [that] follows suit.” But even this unevenness has something valuable to offer, whether teasing out an observation or reshaping a persistent memory, the kind of poring over minor details that reflects, perhaps, the work of a translator. I’m tempted to give the final word to Elizabeth Bishop, weighing the difference, as she does in “Poem,” between “art ‘copying from life’ and life itself,” through lines that seem to get close to the core of Brahic’s latest collection: “[L]ife and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?”