Afterwardness
Published on 31. October 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-1-78410-799-4 (ISBN)
Description
A 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card.
A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019.
Ever since her first Carcanet book, In White Ink (1991), Mimi Khalvati has been drawn to the sonnet form. In Afterwardness its pull became irresistible. She has created in this unprogrammatic series, mixing memory, history, daily life, all her intersecting geographies and cultures, a self-portrait in all her moods, anxieties and delights. The sonnet form is stretched in all sorts of fruitful directions. Just as she adapted the ghazal form to English use, here she puts the Petrarchan sonnet to striking, unfamiliar use, widening the possibilities of the form. The poems are rich with Khalvati's personal history, her Iranian origins, her long years in Great Britain. The poems play between cultures, ancestral and acquired.
A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019.
Ever since her first Carcanet book, In White Ink (1991), Mimi Khalvati has been drawn to the sonnet form. In Afterwardness its pull became irresistible. She has created in this unprogrammatic series, mixing memory, history, daily life, all her intersecting geographies and cultures, a self-portrait in all her moods, anxieties and delights. The sonnet form is stretched in all sorts of fruitful directions. Just as she adapted the ghazal form to English use, here she puts the Petrarchan sonnet to striking, unfamiliar use, widening the possibilities of the form. The poems are rich with Khalvati's personal history, her Iranian origins, her long years in Great Britain. The poems play between cultures, ancestral and acquired.
Reviews / Votes
'I found these sonnets to be exquisite and remarkable, not only for Mimi Khalvati's formal virtuosity but also for her bold and brilliant charting of new ground, in exploring the energies of absence, silence and unknowing. The poet's ear in these poems is attuned not to obvious noise but to night sounds, faint traces, on those whose lives lack narrative or 'underscript'. These poems are playful, moving and brimming with a fierce intelligence, and in this collection, her ninth, Mimi Khalvati is writing at the very height of her lyric power.' - Hannah LoweMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 136 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
105 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-799-4 (9781784107994)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived most of her life in London. She has published eight collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Weather Wheel, a Poetry Book Scoiety Recommendation and a book of the year in The Independent. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith/Dorstop Books 2013) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Writer's Award, and she is the founder of the Poetry School, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.