Child

Reviews / Votes

This wonderful selection, drawing on Khalvati's five previous books as well as new material, is full of moving, quietly insightful meditations on family and domestic spaces, on routines and daily rhythms.

One of the outstanding pieces, 'Sundays', has a typically accomplished intimacy and directness. There's a sense here of poetry as something restorative, a means of gauging a fragile balance between safety and threat ('And suddenly / there's sunshine, brightness and a bounce / and his fingers are dancing. Voices / might bedevil him but voices also // save him').

Other more wide-ranging poems provide explorations of history and nationality, but these are frequently rooted in the near at hand, the glimpse of sudden, elusive perspectives. The sonnet sequence 'The Meanest Flower', for example, relishes such shifting intimate dynamics as it swerves between images of childhood and motherhood.

The book is divided into five parts, the first four ordered autobiographically (rather than by date of composition). And it is the pieces about Khalvati's childhood on the Isle of Wight that, in many ways, are the most successful - the isolation conjured in 'Writing Home' and 'Writing Letters', the use of landscape and careful symbolism in 'The Chine', the clarity and poise of 'Rubaiyat', an elegy for her grandmother.

'Iowa Daybreak', one of the more recent works from the book's last section, provides a sustained and thoughtful exploration of Khalvati's approach. The lyricism has a tremendous delicacy and self-awareness. At its centre she contrasts her own close-range aesthetic with Emily Dickinson's visions of 'the dark and deep' - 'Depths were never truths I reached. / More, the quiet monotony I never // thought of as monotony / but peace. Nothing I loved more / than making torn things whole.' Mimi Khalvati's work has long been admired by other poets, and by her many students at the Poetry School and Arvon Foundation. But she has always had a wide general readership too, drawn to her poems by their rare blend of emotional power, lyrically beauty and formal control. Her accomplishment in traditional forms - from the sonnet to the ghazal - is more than a shaping or structural principle. The intricate tracery of thought and feeling in her work is discovered in and through the rhyme schemes, the metre, the patterns of repetition.

This timely publication of her New and Selected Poems will delight those who already admire her poetry, but it deserves to win her many new readers too. Born in Tehran and educated in Switzerland, Mimi Khalvati worked as a theatre director, actor and translator before publishing her first book - In White Ink - at the age of 47. The body of work gathered here covers the twenty years since that first publication. Reviewing The Chine in 2002, Marilyn Hacker commented that Mimi Khalvati had produced 'a lifetime's body of work in a short decade'. Now, a decade later, that body of work includes perhaps her finest individual collection - the T S Elliot Prize shortlisted The Meanest Flower - and a remarkable batch of new poems.

The poems in this New and Selected volume range from tender poems of home and childhood (many set up on the Isle of Wight where she grew up) to poems of motherhood, love and grief. This is work of great delicacy and poise, intimate and brave, subtle and honest, in which - as David Morley said - we readers find 'the living hand of the poem held always towards us.' The section of new poems that concludes the book is built on powerful sequences, including the impressive: 'The Streets of La Roue', and 'Iowa Daybook', but the centrepiece is a beautiful elegiac sequence - 'Afterword' - on the loss of her partner. This is courageous and haunting poetry: 'Look how solid our buildings are,/ how material the sky.// Paris is where you left it,/ so am I,/ I, small as a single hair,// the infinite divisible./ You the indivisible nowhere,/ whole, entire.'