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.'

Selected Poems

I

Shanklin Chine
Writing Home
The Alder Leaf
Writing Letters
Villanelle
Sadness
Listening to Strawberry
The Chine
Nostalgia
Earls Court
Baba Mostafa
Coma
The Bowl
Ghazal: The Servant
Rubaiyat
from Interiors

II

Needlework
The Woman in the Wall
Stone of Patience
Overblown Roses
from Plant Care
River Sonnet
Come Close
Blue Moon
Boy in a Photograph
The Piano
from The Inwardness of Elephants
Soapstone Creek
Soapstone Retreat
The Robin and the Eggcup
Motherhood
Apology
Sundays
Tintinnabuli
Ghazal: The Children

III

from Entries on Light
Sunday. I woke from a raucous night
Today’s grey light
Scales are evenly weighed
The heavier, fuller, breast and body grow
I hear myself in the loudness of overbearing waves
Speak to me as shadows do
It’s all very well
Light’s taking a bath tonight
With finest needles
Dawn paves its own way
Everywhere you see her
Don’t draw back
Light comes between us and our grief:
One sky is a canvas for jets and vapour trails
Black fruit is sweet, white is sweeter.
And had we ever lived in my country
I loved you so much
This book is a seagull whose wings you hold
: that sky and light and colour
An Iranian professor I know asked me
All yellow has gone from the day.
It’s the eye of longing that I tire of
It is said God created a peacock of light
Why does the aspen tremble
And suppose I left behind
Finally, in a cove

IV

Vine Leaves
The Love Barn
Ghazal after Hafez
Ghazal: To Hold Me
Ghazal: Lilies of the Valley
Ghazal: It’s Heartache
Ghazal: Of Ghazals
Love in an English August
Ghazal: Who’d Argue?
Just to Say
Song
Don’t Ask Me, Love, for that First Love
On Lines from Paul Gauguin
Ghazal: The Candles of the Chestnut Trees
The Mediterranean of the Mind
The Middle Tone
On a Line from Forough Farrokhzad
Scorpion-grass
The Meanest Flower

New and Uncollected Poems

Iowa Daybook
The Streets of La Roue
Afterword
Night Sounds
River Sounding
Cretan Cures
The Poet’s House

Notes