: Mimi Khalvati
: Collected Poems
: Carcanet Poetry
: 9781800173347
: 1
: CHF 25.90
:
: Lyrik
: English
: 624
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
King's Gold Medal for Poetry A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year 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.'

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has lived most of her life in London. After training at Drama Centre London, she worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. She has published nine poetry 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, The Weather Wheel, a PBS Commendation and a book of the year in The Independent, and Afterwardness, a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She was a co-winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition 1989 and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa as the recipient of the William B. Quarton International Writing Program Scholarship, at the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, City University. She is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its three anthologies of new writing published by Enitharmon Press. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Award and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. In 2023 she was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

IN WHITE INK (1991)


‘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” (… as nonname and as source of goods.) 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

WOMAN, STONE AND BOOK


And I woke one night

in tears from a terrible dream

of a small stone house

with a central chimney, a spiral

staircase and grapes on the windowsill.

I later learnt:you are describing

a peasant cottage of the sixteenth century

to be found all over Europe – France,

Poland, Germany. That puts a different

slant on it. The hologram again

adjusting angles of vision receding

into history asserting the right

to unfold itself, perhaps being

itself a section, a skin some godly

presence is peering in to learn

something of what it is to be human.

And I woke one night

in tears from a terrible dream

where I said to the old woman writer

beside meI’ve been here before.

For some strange reason

the woman’s name was Katherine.

Katherine? What does Katherine

mean to you? Katherine Mansfield

was the only name that came to me.

I lived in a house called Mansfield Place,

a small brick cottage in peachy pink

where my children were raised,

a spiral staircase painted blue

holding faces adjusting angles

to my line of vision. I was the big one

in those years. From the turn of the stair

that one about Tom when he was little:

Tom fly he yelled and he flew,

landing on my back in the hall

bending to pick up wellingtons.

Accidents of life preserving it?

Or patterns’ interferences, mute

as the backs of angels who break men’s fall?

And I had been there before in dreams,

playing games of hide and seek

through currant bushes and neighbours’

gardens, forgetting now what I was

searching for if I knew it then.

Something to do with infidelity

I think. In those years these were

things we suffered from, with our hands

in each others’ pockets striving

to become one skin. Letting go,

struggling now to fill our own.

And I asked myself

why are you crying and answered

I am forty-three and have understood

in a dream of woman, stone and book

what all those people mean

and why they mourn

and how clean I have been

through all those years of innocence.

Two camps. The lover and the beloved.

The innocent and the betrayed. Meaning

that to move out of the oppressor’s camp

is to forfeit innocence. Meaning

that to catch oneself at the point

of crossing a line is to wake in tears.

There is the fence. There is the wood.

There is the hunter by his billboard

for trespassers. Here is my face.

Scents of trails criss-cross the undergrowth

dense as twigs. A bird’s hopping is enough

to turn tail for, only to come out at night

sniffing the air clean, criss-crossed by moons

and witches’ brooms and cries of women

pricking the wood’s seven layers of skin:

drops of berries beading a trail

of witness, where the enemy has been.

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 th