beverley bie brahic's Blog
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May.25.2013
If it's Thursday it must be the NYT "Home" section, I think, looking for a reason not to go back to sleep.
And if it's Saturday there's no paper blue-bagged on the porch because I can't face all the weekend extras that, obsessive as I am, I would feel obliged to scan. Or is it the Scottish side? I...
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May.17.2013
I'm thinking I may have to join to Facebook to keep track of my kids' lives. "Did you see the bike picture?" I ask younger daughter, who hadn't let me know whether she'd opened the photo I emailed her a week ago. "Oh yes," she says, "I put it on Facebook." Hmm.
A funny thing happened on the...
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May.14.2013
We went to Yosemite for the weekend, hoping to beat the tourist season (probably impossible) and do some hiking. First excitement: the woods were full of dogwoods in bloom. Dogwood is British Columbia's provincial flower; growing up we always had one domesticated in the garden, but I'd never seen...
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Apr.26.2013
One must begin with the weather, I was thinking, then thinking but California has no weather. Overcast, low fog, beginning to burn off. Pretty soon the sun will free itself from the branch of the redwood tree, and it will be too hot to read outside (Endpoint, a collection of poems by John...
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Apr.14.2013
I think I mentioned that my birthday present was a mountain bike. I think it's my third bike ever, the first as pictured, the second the Raleigh I'd always dreamed of owning, but which in the end I didn't ride much because by then I'd learned to be scared of cars, now this one, secondhand, but...
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Apr.05.2013
I'm delighted to hear that Apollinaire: The Little Auto (CBeditions, 2012) is a finalist for the Northern California Book Awards in the poetry translation category. The award ceremony, which I believe is open to the public, will be on Sunday May 19th at the San Francisco Library.
Most of the poems...
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Mar.29.2013
I see in the NYT business section today, which I get to read with my morning coffee, which is in fact tea, because my husband gets up first, fetches the paper from the porch, pitched there before daybreak by the delivery woman who will also clean our condo if we wish, though hopefully not before...
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Mar.25.2013
Frustrating. Can't seem to manage to finish a book. I get into one, something else comes along, in the mail, from the library, I dip into that, pretty soon there are half a dozen half read books on the bedside table, desk, sofa. First there was Kundera (there's no "first" of course, as the...
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Mar.15.2013
As if by chance, the morning after the power failure, I come across this diptych by Andrew Elliott in Mortality Rate (CBeditions, 2013), a fabulously original collection of poems I'm reading:
Lights Out
Sometimes the mind goes back where it came from
and finds there a boy in his bed...
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Mar.14.2013
When I came home around 6 it was still day light and my husband had been and gone, and left a note: Power Failure. Which meant there was no cooking to be done. I went looking for candles--none. It grew dark. Very dark. Silent too: no fridge hum, no voices, no music across the street. No little...
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Mar.07.2013
Strange how things come about. This week I read Colm Toibin's New Yorker story, "Summer of '38" (also available on Toibin's website). I wouldn't have bothered reading it, had I not earlier randomly listened to podcast with Toibin on Entitled Opinions at the gym, a way to pass time while...
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Mar.03.2013
Qualicum. B.C. Late yesterday afternoon big and little herring boats began to arrive, dozens of them, all converging on the bay; by the time we returned from dinner--where the waitress, newly arrived from Dublin, said the herring season had officially opened at 4 p.m.--they were clustered...
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Mar.02.2013
When I was a child it was an adventure, on the road, to find a motel at the end of the day. They lined the highway, each with its row of numbered doors flanked by a chair, fronted with a parking spot. How convenient it must have seemed: no expensive hotel lobby to traverse, just a small office ("...
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Mar.01.2013
It has been raining steadily since we crossed the Oregon-Washington border, in thick cloud cover, yesterday afternoon. We've flown into Victoria, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, for our last few trips up here (to visit my mother), because the airport is small and the wait at Customs and...
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Feb.24.2013
I feel as if I had been away. People have been coming and going, and we have been up the north coast and down the south coast, yesterday, where it was so windy that we were sandblasted standing on the beach. Seeking shelter, we ended up at the defunct Pigeon Point Lighthouse sitting on a broad...
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About beverley
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC was born in Canada, and lives in Paris and Stanford, California. A translator and poet, her work has appeared in Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, and...