'I've always loved paintings that offer glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that open to other rooms, ' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly. ' Why this moment, not another one?' she asks in ' Root Vegetables, ' one of several poems about human migrations, ' Was famine too abstract for the children we were?' Today her peripatetic life finds her at home in Paris among ' the pissed-on cornerstones of history/Bells chiming the rich hours of every day, ' or in her husband's native Provence. ' I love the look in early spring / Of fields turned over, ' she writes in Apple Thieves, whose poems record human fragility, while relishing the earthbound in all its sensuousness: ' You should eat it hot, ' ' Blackberry Clafoutis' advises, ' Directly from the oven, /But it will still be good/For breakfast, left over' .