Books

Collected Poems (2024)

Mimi Khalvati, one of our best-loved poets, was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent away to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six, only returning to her family in Iran when she was seventeen. The loss of her native country, culture and mother tongue formed the bedrock of her adoptive love of the English language and its lyric tradition. ‘But,’ she says, ‘whether drawing on my few memories of Iran, my long years in London and travelling in the Mediterranean, or on that central void always facing me, I have celebrated the richness of a life that can be lived without a clear sense of heritage, family history or personal biography.’

That wealth is reflected in the wide variety of style, tone and architecture in her Carcanet poetry collections over thirty-three years – free and metrical verse, ranging from short, fixed forms to extended lyrical sequences, from ghazals to the heroic corona or book-length series of sonnets. ‘I hope’, she writes, ‘the poems speak especially to those who have made their homes wherever the tide has brought them, sometimes in language itself, and to those who have no story but place their trust in the flux and flow, the vision of the lyric moment.’

Reviews

‘The marvel of these poems is in their pure lyric flow – like shining a torch around a dark room. Each poem is wonderfully adroit, capturing, often with child-like relish, the touch of the world.’ – Maitreyabandhu, poet

‘She has the ability to find the sublime in art, the capacity to transform things into something that seems lasting… single moments of light in the face of encroaching darkness.’ – Kwame Dawes, Poetry Review

‘… [m]ystical and down-to-earth, innovative and approachable, precise in visual detail but roomy in vision…’ – Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Afterwardness (2019)

A Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card and 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

‘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 Lowe, poet

The Weather Wheel (2014)

In this, her boldest collection to date, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. Restricting herself in each poem to sixteen lines, set in couplets, Khalvati plays kaleidoscopic variations on this form, the lyric falling differently each time, yet the book as a whole retaining a powerful coherence. As the scene shifts from London to the Mediterranean to the Canaries, the poems gain resonance from each other with cumulative intensity, spinning connections across scale and distance. The Weather Wheel is a radiant celebration of the living world despite the loss that lies at the book’s heart.

Reviews

‘The Weather Wheel is the collection Mimi Khalvati was destined to write. It is her most complete and integrated collection to date. There is so much of her in it – in the same way there is so much of Bishop in Bishop’s poems, or Larkin in Larkin’s… Her first full-length collection for seven years, The Weather Wheel consists 72 poems gathered into six subtitled sections, each section consisting of 12 poems. Each poem is 16 lines long and written in couplets. Together they exemplify Frost’s aphorism ‘Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.’ It’s as if Khalvati writes until the words themselves disappear and all we’re left with is stars and moon, tears and happiness, bicycles and pilgrims. They are, to quote Wallace Stevens, as ‘responsive/ As a mirror with a voice.’ – Maitreyabandhu
, poet

Child: New and Selected Poems 1991–2011 (2011)

Poetry Book Society Speical Commendation

Child: New and Selected Poems 1991—2011 combines a generous collation of poems from Mimi Khalvati’s five Carcanet volumes with previously uncollected sequences. She orders her work autobiographically: from childhood and early adulthood; to motherhood; meditations on light; and love and art, circling back to childhood in her celebrated final sequence (‘The Meanest Flower’). The figure of the child stands at the centre of the book: the poet as a schoolgirl, or in later years with her grandmother in Tehran; her children, now grown; children in art; and an enduring sense of oneself as a child that is never left behind. 
Here is the essential Khalvati: exquisitely nuanced, formally accomplished, Romantic in sensibility; rapturous and tender in response to nature, family and love. 

Reviews

‘The poems in this New and Selected volume range from tender poems of home and childhood (many set 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’. – Michael Symmons Roberts, PBS Bulletin

The Meanest Flower (2007)

Inspired by Shakespeare’s songs, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, this collection of songlike poetry is based on the ubiquitous spread of weeds – like the shallow rooting plants, small poems can grow anywhere. In her seventh collection, Khalvati demonstrates a dazzling mastery of traditional forms and experiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form comprised of an unrhymed couplet. Evoking three generations and geographies of women, The Meanest Flower reinstates the joyful, audible aspect of the lyric.

Reviews

‘Any number of other poems could be cited from Khalvati’s superb volume that would further attest to her genius for translating in this way what might superficially seem old or recycled idioms into something novel and almost entirely her own (the collection includes villanelles, terze rime, and even a heroic crown of sonnets).’ – Rafael Campo, Boston Review

The Chine(2002)

Mimi Khalvati weaves themes rooted in her childhood home, the Isle of Wight. She considers the houses in which she lived, the past coming into focus, and the most memorable feature of the island landscape, the chine. These poems also concentrate on family themes that allow Khalvati to demonstrate her lyrical skills while exploring the necessary connections between love in all its forms.

Reviews

‘Humane and generous, these are poems to read again and again; each re-reading will reveal further depths and subtleties. The Chine should establish Mimi Khalvati as one of the foremost poets writing today.’ – Mary MacRae, Magma


‘…her best collection to date’. – Carol Rumens, The Independent

Selected Poems (2000)

Mimi Khalvati’s Selected Poems draws on her three Carcanet collections, In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995) and Entries on Light (1997). 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.

Reviews

‘The mystic Jakob Boehme was suddenly, so he says, given insight into the mystery of the whole cosmos by the sight of light being reflected off a pewter dish. Something ordinary was his entry into light. There are frequent small instances of such illumination here, none the less valuable for being homely, earthly, domestic and insistently human. That is, the earth never becomes a stepping stone to some Higher Reality, but remains sufficient, if we can only see it right; which, precisely, these poems help us do.’ – David Constantine, Poetry London

Entries on Light (1997)

Entries on Light is a series of meditations on light, on what light is and does, how – as it changes – it invents and reinvents the things we see, are and were, how it inscribes our shadows and our feelings.  Mimi Khalvati has always had a well-trained eye; she is also formally among the most resourceful poets writing today.  If at times we think of Constable in the billowing movement of her fuller stanzas, we also – in short-phrased sections – are put in mind of the flat skies of Hokusai. She is a poet in whose vision east and west join.

Reviews

‘Shimmering fragments of subjectivity and sweeping visions of the lived landscapes of language, love and loss, coalesce.’ – Aamer Hussein – Books of the Year, The Independent



‘She has the ability to find the sublime in art, the capacity to transform things into something that seems lasting. Sometimes she is so quotable: “Light comes between us and our grief/flushes it out with gold”. There are so many more such gems… She ends the collection with a brilliant articulation of the value of light – single moments of light in the face of encroaching darkness.’ – Kwame Dawes, Poetry Review

Mirrorwork (1995)

In Mirrorwork, Mimi Khalvati takes the Islamic art of mirror-mosaic as metaphor. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act as a mirror tryptych, their themes – of art, nature, domestic life and  memory, east and west – drawing the other poems together.  In Mirrorwork, Khalvati at once establishes a voice and questions its integrity.

Reviews

‘The title poem of Mirrorwork focuses on a mirror-tree outside her home, a metaphor that literally sparkles and reflects in many directions. The image is used as a starting-point for a series of meditations on exile and homeland, truth and perception, moving towards a philosophy of realism and tolerance. There’s a fiercely questioning spirit and a strong moral dimension to this, and indeed all the poems in the collection … Khalvati is a poet of great sophistication, subtlety and delicacy. Her poems offer a depth and complexity beneath their lyrical surface that demands and rewards re-reading.’ – Christina Patterson, New Statesman & Society

In White Ink (1991)

Mimi Khalvati’s first book of poems takes its title from Hélène Cixous’ observation that women write ‘in white ink’. The resonances of this phrase are explored in many of these poems. Writing in her adoptive mother tongue, Khalvati explores loss and recovery of country, language, family and power. The poems affirm the centrality of women and their relationships and celebrate, too, with candour and gentleness, the power of motherhood.

Reviews

‘Mimi Khalvati is an outstanding talent, and we are privileged as we read through this collection to see the author shedding skins until full maturity is reached in the final sequence ‘Plant Care’ … In short, here is poetry of depth, intensity and sensuous power, one of the peaks in the contemporary poetic landscape.’ – John Killick, The North