Apple Thieves

'I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms, ' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell - 'an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely' - collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in 'Root Vegetables'. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris - 'Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction' - 'time-hedged cottages' and the earthbound in all its fragility.