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    Selected Poems: Mimi Khalvati
    Selected Poems: Mimi Khalvati
    Selected Poems: Mimi Khalvati
    Ebook203 pages1 hour

    Selected Poems: Mimi Khalvati

    By Mimi Khalvati

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This collection of selected poems draws on her three Carcanet works: In White Ink, Mirrorwork, and Entries on Light. It provides us with the essential Khalvati, from the ambitiously wrought early formal poems, full of Persian and personal shadows, through to the meditations in the long sequence Entries on Light. She brings into English poetry distinct formal and tonal elements of Persian and Islamic provenance. A mature eroticism marks her poems; also, a feeling for nature in all its varieties.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateNov 1, 2012
    ISBN9781847777973
    Selected Poems: Mimi Khalvati
    Author

    Mimi Khalvati

    Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six. She has lived most of her life in London. She has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Weather Wheel, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a book of the year in The Independent. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith/Doorstop Books 2013), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa, the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, and her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a major Arts Council Writer's Award. She is the founder of the Poetry School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.

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    • 2/5
      Usually publishers have a clear distinct understanding in the use of "selected poetry" and "collected poetry", the former suggesting a selection and the latter suggesting completeness albeit "up till then". It is also true that occasionally the title of a book on the cover is different from the title on the title page, often for marketing purposes. I wonder why the title of this volume is "Collected poems" on the title page but "Selected poems" on the cover. (Patrick Kavanagh (2005). Selected poems in Penguin Classics. The editor Antoinnette Quinn has quite a lot to say about about this in the bibliographical note (pp. xli-xlii), insisting that the present volume is named "Selected poems", making the title on the title page all the more puzzling, as in academic practice the title on the title page should take precedence over the title on the cover.Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was an Irish poet. The introduction mentions that Kavanagh's poetry was not very well received by critics. He saw himself as an outsider, hesitant to call himself a poet.The poems show an independent mind that doesn't regard or follow the trends of the time. The reading is not easy. as poems seem of a certain roughness or stubbornness or even clumsiness over melodious flow. The poetry is marked my religion and rural, elements not often associated with modern poetry. Still, the poet seems to try to reconcile the modern form with traditional rhythm and form of ballads.I did not enjoy reading this collection, few poems really interested me.

    Book preview

    Selected Poems - Mimi Khalvati

    MIMI KHALVATI

    SELECTED POEMS

    Contents

    Title Page

    from IN WHITE INK (1991)

    The Woman in the Wall

    Stone of Patience

    Family Footnotes

    Shanklin Chine

    Sick Boy

    Blue Moon

    The Bowl

    Rubaiyat

    Earls Court

    In Lieu of a Postcard

    Jasmine

    Rice

    Baba Mostafa

    Haiku

    from MIRRORWORK (1995)

    from Mirrorwork

    Vine-Leaves

    What Seemed so Quiet

    The North-Facing Garden

    Writing in the Sun

    Prayer

    Needlework

    from Interiors

    Au Jardin du Luxembourg (detail)

    Boy in a Photograph

    Coma

    Love

    That Night at the Jazz Café

    Apology

    from A View of Courtyards

    from ENTRIES ON LIGHT (1997)

    Knocking on the door you open

    Sunday. I woke from a raucous night

    Today’s grey light

    Scales are evenly weighed

    Streetlamps threw battlements

    The heavier, fuller, breast and body grow

    Through me light drives on seawall

    In the amber

    The air is the hide of a white bull

    I’m silenced in

    I hear myself in the loudness of overbearing waves

    Speak to me as shadows do

    This book is a seagull whose wings you hold

    I’m opening the door of shadow

    One upper pane by a windchime

    I’ve never been in a hurry

    It’s all very well

    Show, show me

    : that sky and light and colour

    I love all things in miniature

    In that childhood time

    Light’s taking a bath tonight

    Dawn paves its own way

    With finest needles

    When sky paints itself

    There’s no jewel we can think of

    Moons come in all the colours

    Why not mention the purple flower

    One sky is a canvas for jets and vapour trails

    Black fruit is sweet, white is sweeter

    He’s tying up the gypsophila

    And had we ever lived in my country

    Winter’s strains

    And in the sea’s blackness sank

    When space is at its emptiest

    Was it morning, night?

    Curling her tail

    His 18th. He likes Chinese

    Staring up from his pram to the sky

    New Year’s Eve

    In this country

    Here’s dusk to burrow in

    All yellow has gone from the day

    While the tulip threatens to lose one leaf

    Darling, your message on the phone

    Is it before or after the fiesta?

    On a late summer’s day that draws to a close

    First you invite me to tea under your appletree

    Everywhere you see her

    Don’t draw back

    Light comes between us and our grief

    Why does the aspen tremble

    Boys have been throwing stones all day

    Foreshortened, light claws out of the sea

    On a diving-board

    I have removed the scaffolding

    So high up in a house

    These homes in poems

    For you, who are a large man

    When, against a cloth

    The gate has five bars

    I’m reading with the light on

    Times are – thinking about new wine

    Like old red gold

    An Iranian professor I know asked me

    I’ve always grown in other people’s shade

    … Human beings must be taught to love

    Nothing can ruin the evening

    It’s the eye of longing that I tire of

    To be so dependent on sunlight

    What is he looking for

    It is said God created a peacock of light

    Too much light is tiresome

    Light’s sharpening knives of water

    I’ve stored all the light I need

    I loved you so much

    Air’s utterly soft

    And suppose I left behind

    ‘Going away’

    Finally, in a cove

    It can come from the simplest of things

    Notes and Dedications for Entries on Light

    Also by Mimi Khalvati

    Copyright

    from In White Ink

    In women’s speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating … is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman … A woman is never far from ‘mother’ … There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.

    Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

    The Woman in the Wall

    Why they walled her up seems academic.

    They have their reasons. She was a woman

    with a nursing child. Walled she was

    and dying. But even when they surmised

    there was nothing of her left but dust and ghost

    at dawn, at dusk, at intervals

    the breast recalled, wilful as the awe

    that would govern village lives, her milk flowed.

    And her child suckled at the wall, drew

    the sweetness from the stone and grew

    till the cracks knew only wind and weeds

    and she was weaned. Centuries ago.

    Stone of Patience

    ‘In the old days,’ she explained to a grandchild

    bred in England, ‘in the old days in Persia

    it was the custom to have a stone, a special stone

    you would keep to talk to, tell your troubles to,

    a stone we called, as they now call me, a stone of patience.’

    No therapists then to field a question with another

    but stones from dust where ladies’ fingers, cucumbers

    curled in sun. Were the ones they used for gherkins

    babies that would have grown, like piano tunes had we known

    the bass beyond the first few bars? Or miniatures?

    Some things I’m content to guess – colour in a crocus-tip,

    is it gold or mauve? A girl or a boy … Patience

    was so simple then, waiting for the clematis to open,

    to purple on a wall, the bud to shoot out stamens,

    the jet of milk to leave its rim like honey on the bee’s fur.

    But patience when the cave is sealed, a boulder

    at the door, is riled by the scent of hyacinth

    in the blue behind the stone: a willow by the pool

    where once she sat to trim a beard with kitchen scissors,

    to tilt her hat at smiles, sleep, congratulations.

    And a woman faced with a lover grabbing for his shoes

    when women friends would have put themselves in hers

    no longer knows what’s virtuous. Will anger

    shift the boulder, buy her freedom and the earth’s?

    Or patience like the earth’s be abused? Even nonchalance

    can lead to courage, conception: a voice that says

    oh come on darling, it’ll be alright, oh do let’s.

    How many children were born from words such as these?

    I know my own were, now learning to repeat them,

    to outgrow a mother’s awe of consequence her body bears.

    So now that midsummer, changing shape, has brought in

    another season, the grape becoming raisin, hinting

    in a nip at the sweetness of a clutch, one fast upon another;

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