Hunting the Boar

PBS Recommendation - Summer 2016  

    Interrogation, the routine

      humiliation – stifled cries

      like sex, like birth: expulsed from

      (some concertina-wired town)

      like the bodies she sees

      on the world’s front page

      dumped like dirty clothes

      in front of the machine.

‘I want this to happen in a second / on the page,’ Brahic writes in ‘Stations in the Metro’. ‘But the mind keeeps thinking other things.’ Poised and intimately crafted, Brahic’s poems flicker restlessly in their attention to everything – history, memories, food, desire – that is the present moment.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a prize-winning translator of Apollinaire, Yves Bonnefoy and Francis Ponge. Her previous collection, White Sheets, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize:

'A book of craft, music and a collected vision of life that provides pleasure on every page.’

     – Eavan Boland

 ‘Perhaps partly because of Brahic’s translation work, there’s a sense of joy in language . . .White Sheets is immensely readable, skilfully crafted and rich with ideas and feeling.’

     – Katherine Stansfield, Magma

‘Brahic writes with singular, and non-sentimental, brilliance.’

     – Ian Pople, Manchester Review