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New pamphlet
Earthshine • Smith/Doorstop, May 2013 • ISBN: 978-1-906613-87-7 > read a poem <
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'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
'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
Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011 • Carcanet, 2011 • ISBN: 978-1-847770-94-3 > read a poem <
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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.
'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 • Carcanet, July 2007 • ISBN: 1-85754-868X > read a poem <
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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
The Chine • Carcanet, Jan 2002 • ISBN: 1-85754-547-8 > read a poem <
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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 <
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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 • Carcanet, Nov 1997 • ISBN: 1-85754-329-7 > read a poem <
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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
Mirrorwork • Carcanet, Jan 1995 • ISBN: 1-85754-114-6 > read a poem <
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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 <
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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, 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 •
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