Latest book

The Meanest Flower book cover by Mimi Khalvati. Historic drawing of small flowers on a sheet of faded paper with a pink boarder and white band at top with title, name and logo.

The Meanest Flower • Carcanet, 26 Jul 2007 • ISBN: 1-85754-868X > read a poem <

Poetry Book Society Recommendation / Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007

Wordsworth's 'meanest flower that blows' suggested to him 'thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears'. The lyrics, elegies, songs and ghazals in Mimi Khalvati's new book pay attention to things the imagination generally disregards, an attention that is concentrated, intense and unapologetically Romantic. Hers is the true voice of feeling, undeflected by irony or self-deprecation. There is rapture in these poems as well as a tragic sense: nature, childhood, motherhood and family relationships all have a double valency, a give and take, to which Khalvati witnesses with a feeling sharpened by love and grief.

'Mimi Khalvati is one of the most poignant and graceful poets writing in England currently. The Meanest Flower speaks often of grief and loss but also of great pleasure in the world, in gardens, in loves, in other people. Under the lyricism there is an iron control that achieves its grace through subtlety. There reader is aware one is in the presence of a mind, a heart and an ear that has been schooled in depth, that finds it as naturally as do the flowers of the title.' - George Szirtes

'A lovely book, so accomplished, various, comprehensive and abundant. The poems are quick and touching, joyfully and sorrowfully open to the phenomena of the real world, they say what it feels like being human, the good and the ill of it, with passion, tact and lightness.' - David Constantine

Poetry collections

The Chine • Carcanet, Jan 2002 • ISBN: 1-85754-547-8 > read a poem <

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.

Extracts from Reviews: The Chine
'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 • Carcanet, Mar 2000 • ISBN: 1-85754-472-2 > read a poem <

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.

Extracts from Reviews: Selected Poems
‘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 cover. A glass painting including pillars, flowers and birds

Entries on Light • Carcanet, Nov 1997 • ISBN: 1-85754-329-7 > read a poem <

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.

Extracts from Reviews: Entries on Light
‘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

Mirrow Work cover with pink background and the title written virtically on the righ side

Mirrorwork • Carcanet, Jan 1995 • ISBN: 1-85754-114-6 > read a poem <

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.

Extracts from Reviews: Mirrorwork
‘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 • Carcanet, Sept 1991 • ISBN: 0-85635-949-1 > read a poem <

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.

Extracts from Reviews: In White Ink
‘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

Other books

The Poet in the Wall book cover. White background with a blue boarder and blue title.

The Poet in the Wall, tr. Lidia Vianu • Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic, 2007 •

Plant Care: A Festschrift for Mimi Khalvati (ed. E.A.Markham) • Sheffield & Paris: Linda Lee Books 2004 •

I Know a Place (illustrated by Beverlie Manson) • London: Dent’s Children’s Books,1985. (Dutch edn. 1986) •

Pamphlets

Mimi Khalvati: Come fanno le ombre (a cura di Eleonora Chiavetta) • Sciascia editore, 2006 •

Persian Miniatures/A Belfast Kiss (with David Morley) • Smith/Doorstop, 1990 •