Very Selected: Mimi Khalvati (2017)
Smith/Doorstop
This Very Selected pamphlet brings together short lyrics selected from Mimi Khalvati’s six previous collections, including several of her ghazals.
The Soul Travels on Horseback is from a folk saying which tells us why, if we travel, it may take a day or two before we feel we have fully arrived: our soul, travelling on horseback, has yet to catch up with us. These poems inhabit that liminal space of longing or existential homesickness, while also being in love with the given world. Rather than trying to hold the page, they yearn to be weightless enough to become part of the surrounding air and its ever-changing light and shade.
Reviews
Mimi Khalvati’s poetry is, in the best sense, ‘expectable’. She writes about love, memory, ageing, and the natural world. Many of her poems are in disciplined forms that still surprise and delight the reader. We trust this poet. – Norbert Hirschhorn at London Grip
The marvel os 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, POEM
Earthshine (2013)
Smith/Doorstop
‘Written around the time of my mother’s death, these poems take the day’s weather as a starting-point before spinning off in their own directions. They express the effects of weather on my mood and imagination and a desire to reconnect with the animal self — several are about small creatures, mostly real, some imaginary. The only person, apart from the speaker, that appears in these poems is the figure of my mother. Her absence, echoing her absence in my childhood, seems now, as then, to have intensified my relationship with the natural world — the huge presences of sky, stars, sun, moon, and the smaller presences of flora and fauna. By way of elegising my mother’s death, I celebrate these living companions. Although they have a sad undertow, I hope the poems are light and playful without denying the dark and dangers in the wider world.’ – Mimi Khalvati, 2013
Reviews
‘Like a naturalist, but with a poet’s lexicon, Khalvati lovingly observes plants and animals, the smaller mammals and birds given centre stage. These warm-blooded species, with their delicacy, their fur and feathers, are, as slowly becomes apparent, a healing replacement for the deceased mother. In the wake of that death, as she reconceives her life on earth, Khalvati is also reinventing poetry.’ – Alfred Corn, poet
Persian Miniatures/A Belfast Kiss (with David Morley)
Smith/Doorstop, 1990
