Khalvati Collected Poems

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80017-334-7
Verlag: Carcanet Poetry
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 624 Seiten

King's Gold Medal for Poetry Winner of the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2025 A Guardian Book of the Year 2024 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Khalvati, Mimi

Leseproben

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,

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:

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 me

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:

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 they surmised

there was nothing of her left but dust and ghost,

at dawn, at dusk, at intervals

the breast recalled, wilful as the awe

that would govern village lives, her milk flowed.

And her child suckled at the wall, drew

the sweetness from the stone and grew

till the cracks knew only wind and weeds

and she was weaned. Centuries ago.

AMANUENSIS

Mirza, scribe me a circle beneath

the grid that drew Columbus

from isle to isle, tipped the scale,

measured a plus and minus

in our round lives. Amanuensis,

do you hear me? Look at the tree

holding the sky in its arms, the earth

in its bowels. Oh, draw me

the rings in its bark, a beaded spiral

where I may walk on Persian

carpets woven in dyes from sandbanks

where goats graze and the melon

cools in the stream. Have you seen the dome

of the mosque? Our signatures are there,

among galaxies, infinities: an incredulity

that leads even infidels to prayer!

The pool in the square is green with twine.

The tiles in the arch are floods

of blue brocade. And those painted stars

in the vault, this hive of hoods

and white arcades, are the stars and the sky

I saw on a night in Spain:

coves of milk and stalactites; the very same.

So leave your sacks of grain

my Mirza, your ledgers and your abacus. Turn back

to brighter skills than these:

your mirrors and mosaics. From each trapezium,

polygon, each small isosceles

face, extract me, entwine me. Be my double

helix! My polestar! My asterisks!

Nestle in my silences. But spell me out

and rhyme me in your lunes and arabesques!

STONE OF PATIENCE

‘In the old days’, she explained to a grandchild bred in England,

‘in the old days in Persia, it was the custom to have a stone,

a special stone you would choose from a rosebed, or a goat-patch,

a stone of your own to talk to, tell your troubles to,

a stone we called, as they now call me, a stone of patience.’

No therapists then to field a question with another,

but stones from dust where ladies’ fingers, cucumbers

curled in sun. Were the ones they used for gherkins

babies that would have grown, like piano tunes had we known

the bass beyond the first few bars? Or miniatures?

Some things I’m content to guess: colour in a crocus tip,

is it gold or mauve? A girl or a boy… Patience

was so simple then: waiting for the clematis to open,

to purple on a wall; the bud to shoot out stamens,

the jet of milk to leave its rim like honey

on the bee’s fur. But patience when the cave is sealed,

a boulder at the door, is riled by the scent of hyacinth

in the blue behind the stone: the willow by the pool

where once she sat to trim a beard with kitchen scissors,

to tilt her hat at smiles, at sleep, at congratulations.

And a woman, faced with a lover grabbing for his shoes

when women friends would have put themselves in hers,

no longer knows what’s virtuous. Will anger shift

the boulder, buy her freedom, and the earth’s? Or patience,

like the earth’s, be abused? Even nonchalance

can lead to courage, to conception: a voice that says

How many children were born from words such as these?

I know my own were; now learning to repeat them, to outgrow

a mother’s awe of consequences her body bears.

So now that midsummer, changing shape, has brought in

another season, the grape becoming raisin, hinting

in a nip at the sweetness of a clutch, one fast upon another;

now that the breeze is raising sighs from sheets

as she tries to learn again, this time for herself,

to fling caution to the winds like colour in a woman’s skirt

or to borrow patience from the stones in her own backyard

where fruit still hangs on someone else’s branch… don’t ask her

as if it mattered. Say:

as you reach for a leaf, for the branch, and pull it down.

FAMILY FOOTNOTES

My arms in the sink, I half-listen

as someone keeps me company:

I pause and to my own surprise

realize, seeing her suddenly through the eyes

of guests, how small she seems;

like a robin redbreast perched with other

mothers I thank god aren’t mine.

My father cracks a joke on the transatlantic

line, misreading my alliances;

decades of regret still failing

to make her an easy butt.

But his laugh is warm bubble, a devil

to slip into, like the fold of his cheek

and the film of his eye, film that I know

my own before long will look through.

My children are with me, as always, my son

even now sleeping under covers

I have no more to do with. He is always

loving. To say this, to think this

seems suspect in a world such as ours.

How have we escaped it?

My daughter is about to bumble in the door,

late as usual, and be sweet to me,

nattering on as I clatter in the kitchen,

her breasts within an inch of my arm.

Nothing seems to rattle her: embarrassments

that floor me, still, at my age.

She is chock-a-block with courage;

fresh air on her cheeks like warpaint.

Pooled in this – this love – and this – and this –

what...