I wanted to start off with the title of your new collection: Apple Thieves. It immediately reminded me of the Garden of Eden and Eve’s status as the first ‘apple thief.’ In 2018 you also published The Hotel Eden.

I want to ask if Christian thought was an inspiration for your title & work and if so, what is it that you respond to in the Eden narrative?

Finding a book title isn’t easy. Ideally, you want it to carry some of the book’s themes. But I am not good at knowing what these are. In the end I chose Apple Thieves because I like the poem and it seems somewhat applicable to the spirit of the book, with its praise of the earthbound, but also, notably in the third stanza, with its rejection of ‘perfection’. Our earthly ‘paradise’ is far from perfect, maybe not even – like us, its dangerous and endangered inhabitants – imperishable. The end of another of the book’s poems, ‘At My Window,’ (‘they rambled off into a sunrise / Smelling of piss and baking bread, / The city in its glory and dereliction /All ahead…’)  shoots a glance at Paradise Lost. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some corner of my mind, Elizabeth Bishop’s marvelously messy world, say, in her poem ‘Santarém’, wasn’t rattling around.

The ‘thieves’ – squirrels in the poem – of course recall the tales from Eve to Augustine and beyond about fruit thieves and their come-uppances. Someone told me I have a squirrel poem in each collection. I haven’t checked. But I see squirrels as smaller versions of ourselves. Picture books, fables and the creek across the road from me are alive with the small creatures. I snuck a death in, at the poem’s end. I think I see that as prepared for but also so inevitable as to be hardly worth noticing. It’s a true story, by the way, somewhat embellished.

I haven’t revisited The Hotel Eden since it was published in 2018; I think its title poem may be less positive: ‘This poster for Eden/Scorched and brittle as a boy’s treasure map’ and fragmented beyond understanding. The poem refers to one of Joseph Cornell’s glass boxes, also often referred to as ‘The Hotel Eden’, but threaded with thoughts of my own. Cornell was a reclusive artist; there’s an interesting description of this particular box, which is in Canada’s National Museum.

I was enrolled in Sunday School as a child in a Presbyterian-leaning church (my forebears left Scotland for Canada). I am grateful for the immersion in the King James Bible, its language and stories. Undoubtedly, I have been formed by Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular (see ‘Blackberry Clafoutis’: ‘its punitive guarded / Providence’); nowadays I’d call myself  a ‘humanist’ if the humane includes other living creatures.

I noticed when reading ‘Exo-Skeleton’ that the first stanza is shared with your poem ‘The Shell’ from Catch and Release. Could you elaborate on why these poems share the same stanzas – Is ‘Exo-Skeleton’ a progression of ‘The Shell’?

Is this the place to confess that I never stop revising or at least ‘tweaking’? ‘Exoskeleton’ or ‘Shell’ first appeared in 2019 in the TLS, then in my pamphlet Catch and Relief. A year or some ago I retitled it ‘Exoskeleton,’ wanting a more technical word that reflected the shell’s use as shelter, or perhaps armour (with a nod to Marianne Moore’s wonderful ‘The Pangolin’). Sometimes I tweak poems when I put a collection together because I see an opportunity to point up commonalities and create links to surrounding poems. The Acknowledgement page speaks of ‘earlier versions’ which could/should be expanded to include ‘other titles.’

I was struck by your description of ‘Apple Thieves’ as full of painterly moments. It reminded me of Baudelaire’s notion of the flaneur (a figure whose work you have previously translated). Would you describe this approach of honing in on the small details, an intuitive and natural response or is it a more artistic and conscious choice that you have made?

Good question! A bit of both, I expect. Baudelaire’s ability to make an argument complete with enough painterly details to succinctly picture the scene, all within the constraints of, say, the sonnet is exceptional. He was also an art critic at a pivotal moment in French/European painting, attentive to both line and colour; that is, as I understand it, argument and (local) colour. In my case, I think I might be more inclined to credit Elizabeth Bishop whose generous descriptions and story-telling I love. Same for Apollinaire.

In your career you have been involved in translating a variety of poets from Baudelaire to Yves Bonnefoy. In what ways has translation impacted your approach to your own writing?

Very simply, I love translating. For me, every translation is a master class in the art of writing. Francis Ponge was one of my first loves; Apollinaire was the second…and so on. Baudelaire is a stretch, but a good stretch. Right now I’m translating Leopardi, the great Italian Romantic poet; he’s a stretch too, but differently. His poems are very sensuous, full of local colour, but he is also known as a philosopher poet, who disserts, despairingly, on the human condition.

I often warm up by translating a poem. That sets a high bar – I’m always hoping ‘to fail better,’ as Beckett said. One wonderful thing about translation is that the original poem gives you the shape of the beast: ‘all’ the translator has to do is play with the words (and lineation), which can be endlessly fascinating, not to say challenging. Here again, I’m sure I could ‘fail better’, especially with Baudelaire, if I took another shot. You live and learn. And there are lots of Baudelaire poems left to translate.

Your poems evoke a strong sense of space. These spaces range geographically from US West Coast to Paris and Provincial France. Where did the initial fascination and relationship begin between your writing and space?

I suspect this is more a question of place than space, though every time I fly across the ocean and North American continent I am conscious of the space. Right now I’m working on a poem about flying over the Canadian North, Saskatchewan (where I was born) and Vancouver (where I grew up). My mother, who grew up on the Canadian Prairies always missed the sense of space she had on those great flat plains; she felt ‘hemmed in’ by mountains. Perhaps I have been influenced by her attachment to spaciousness of the Prairies. Provence is my husband’s home. I think of ‘home’ as the British Columbia shoreline; France is my second home; I’ve become attached to the landscape of the Vaucluse. Paris is important too.

Speaking of space, I wanted to mention ‘Arrivals Level’. It differs in tone to your other poems, focusing more on the politicisation of spaces and how they can be weaponised. Could you speak about negative spaces that you may have encountered and how you approach them in your writing?

I see ‘Arrivals Level’ as a poem about immigration and immigrants and maybe too, the homeless. I think anyone who lives in a European or American city is confronted daily with both of these painful situations, and reminded of how fortunate we (I speak for myself) are to have shelter, food, schools, hospitals and no wars being fought around us. Touch wood. It’s easy not to see the cameras that patrol our streets, but reading a daily newspaper is a constant gut punch. Europe and America begin to feel like gated communities.

Finally, I wanted to end on the act of remembering a space. Nostalgia can alter the realities of spaces into more romanticised versions of themselves. Have you dealt with this before when writing about a certain place in memory? In your poem ‘In the First Place’, the line ‘Today I know memory is unfaithful’ struck me. Do you allow your writing to be affected by nostalgia? Do you think poetry has an obligation to the truth?

Yes, I agree with you. Childhood memories are likely to be affected by nostalgia, though I don’t think we remember everything through rose-coloured glasses. Proust, for instance, the great ‘rememberer’ of childhood (his own), managed to evoke the misery as well as the comedy of family life. But it’s a mystery, often, what we remember (and might like to forget). I love those first, sea, river and forest landscapes; if I find myself in a place, say St. Andrews whose shoreline reminds me of home, I feel the same pinch in my heart.

Memory, one is surprised to discover, is often not faithful at all – just ask someone else who was there. This experience can be jaw-dropping to the point of questioning one’s truths. ‘I may be remembering this all wrong,’ as Elizabeth Bishop wrote with her habitual self-deprecation. As for the ‘blackest berries taste best,’ who doesn’t like to wallow in their own misery?

‘Truth’ is a big word: that ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ That was Wittgenstein. Or there’s Keats. For myself, yes, I try to discover and write the truth as I understand it at a given moment. I also love, for instance, the hyperbole of magic realism.
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Victoria Modi-Celda is a student at the University of St Andrews, entering her final year of a degree in Art History and English. She specialises in Ottoman manuscript and periodicals, prose of the Romantic period and the Viennese Seccession. Alongside her studies, she is literary editor for Stereoscope Magazine.
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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, Hélène 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.