Search results for ""Author Mimi Khalvati""

In this extended elegey for her mother, each poem written in couplets and contained within the space of sixteen lines, 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.

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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.

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In her second collection of poetry, Mimi Khalvati uses the image of Islamic mirror-mosaic - found in palaces, barber shops and kebab houses. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act a mirror tryptych, their themes of art, nature, domestic life, memory, east and west draw the other poems together. She establishes a voice and questions its integrity. In many ways, it is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.

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"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, telling the stories of her life in four sections: childhood and early adulthood; 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, appearing in many guises: the poet as a schoolgirl on the Isle of Wight, or in half-remembered later years living with her grandmother in Tehran; her two children, now grown up; 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. Her poems, David Constantine writes, "say what it feels like being human, the good and the ill of it, with passion, tact and lightness".

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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.

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