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The Hotel Eden

Beverley Bie Brahic

The Hotel Eden
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Categories: 21st Century, American, Canadian, War writings, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2018)
9781784106102
£9.99 £8.99
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(Pub. Aug 2018)
9781784106119
£7.99 £7.19
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • ‘Madame Martin will throw back her shutters at eight…’ With these words Beverley Bie Brahic opens The Hotel Eden, a book about seeing the world. She moves through – Paris, the French provinces, the American west coast – in the spirit of a flâneur, going about her daily life alert to the variety and mystery of human experience: the soup kitchens, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Latin Quarter, the refugees, works of art and areas of damage. The title poem pays a debt to Joseph Cornell, the master of the assemblage, whose ‘The Hotel Eden’ discloses a stuffed parrot and other objects under glass. The eye – the poem – assembles them but cannot tell their intended story. It tells a story all the same. ‘On the tip of God’s tongue, the bird waits to be named.’ This is a book of revelatory indirections, of unexpected moons, creatures, passions, rituals and histories, of days rich in disclosures and in hints of revelation. One of the presiding spirits of her book is the Latin poet Horace, whose prayer she renders as her own:

    Grant me, Apollo, calm and contentment,
    A healthy body, a mind clear,
    And let my old age be spent
    Without dishonour nor the sound of my lyre.
    Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, 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 ... read more
     'I love the way that the unworldly and extraordinary is accessed through its relationship to the mundane, which, by a kind of artists' version of Newton's law, gains something unworldly and extraordinary in return'

    Philip Rush, The North


    '...it is [the] attention to the everyday stuff of life that makes Brahic's poetry shine... simple, painterly, offering the same 'abundance' for the reader that Beverley Bie Brahic finds in her pears.'



    Suzannah V. Evans, The Times Literary Supplement.

    'Brahic's aesthetic works effectively to nurture a sense of instability that dismantles expectation... leaving the answers to the questions at the foot of the reader... both daring and delicate.'
    Maryam Hessavi, The Manchester Review
    'A sharp and tender act of assemblage'
    Maryam Hessavi, The Manchester Review
    'Bie Brahic has an eye for the telling detail...yet she is never satisfied with the simple description.'
    David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent
     'The poems in this collection are energised by themes of temporal and spatial progression. Seasons move on with a dream-like quality, the warm, hazy summer poems of the first part slipping into the cooler tones of autumn and winter as the poetic voice moves from place to place. Plants grow, bees buzz and the rural, provincial and domestic become transcendent. An exquisitely poetic sequence.'
    PBS Autumn Bulletin 2018
     'Fearlessly physical and observant (John Updike's fiction comes to mind), Brahic carries on writing where many poets would stop, and earns that space.' 
    Carol Rumens, Poetry Review
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