Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06): Beverley’s poetry collection White Sheets (2012, CBEditions, UK; Fitzhenry & Whitefield, NA) is one of five collections on the shortlist for the 2012 Forward Prize. The £10,000 award is one of the UK’s top poetry prizes.  Previously winners include poets Don Paterson, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes.  You can read more about this year’s finalists in The Guardian.

Poems from White Sheets have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, The TLS and elsewhere.

WHITE SHEETS

Airstrike hits wedding party—breaking news

The empty laundry basket
fills with molecules of light.
She stands beside it, arms falling
into the aftermath of the task.
Gesture is a proto-language
researchers say: the same circuits
light the brain when a chimp
signals help me please (hand
outstretched, palm up) as when
human beings process speech.
In the cave the hunter figure
mirrors his spear’s trajectory
towards the deer it will never,
of course, attain. The woman
sees nothing untoward. Her body
bars the spattered something
in the middle distance, though all
of this is right up close: the shed
they’ll use to dress the meat, the plane
geometry of white sheets
on a line. The world is beautiful,
she thinks, or feels, as deer
sense something coming
and move out of range. Beautiful,
the woman thinks, and lifts
the laundry basket to her arms—
beautiful, and orderly.

Beverley’s translation of Apollinaire’s poems, The Little Auto is also available from CBEditions.