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Excerpt
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Contents
Awards
Reviews

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

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 ... read more

Awards won by Mimi Khalvati Winner, 2023 The King's Gold Medal for Poetry
Winner, 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card (Afterwardness) Winner, 2014 Poetry Book Society Recommendation (The Weather Wheel) Winner, 2011 Poetry Book Society Special Commendation (Child) Short-listed, 2007 The T.S. Eliot Prize (The Meanest Flower)

Praise for Mimi Khalvati 'This generous, expansive volume affirms Khalvati's place as one of the UK's most accomplished lyric poets.'
Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian
'The marvel of these poems is in their pure lyric flow â like shining a torch around a dark room. Each poem is wonderfully adroit, capturing, often with child-like relish, the touch of the world.'
Maitreyabandhu, Poem 'She has the ability to find the sublime in art, the capacity to transform things into something that seems lasting... single moments of light in the face of encroaching darkness.'
Kwame Dawes, Poetry Review
'... [m]ystical and down-to-earth, innovative and approachable, precise in visual detail but roomy in vision...'
Carol Rumens, The Guardian 'Khalvati's method is never formulaic and is always open to experience.'
W S Milne, Agenda
'What I find remarkable is how little ego there is in this exploration, how sensitively and empathetically Khalvati looks out to the experience of other people, mixing hers with theirs so that the two often become indistinguishable'
Edmund Prestwich, The North
'This collection has so many layers and cross-currents. There are rich memories hiding here'
D A Powell, Under the Radar
'Poetry of the highest order'
John Wheway, The High Window

'What is particularly striking throughout the collection is how the poems are able to move through time in relation to one's age, life or nationality.'

Anthony Anaxagorou, PBS Winter Selection 2019

'In so many of these poems, the images frame and enunciate the character of an exiles life with tremendous resonance. The recurrent, deeply traditional formal design of the Petrarchan sonnet grounds the collection and provides a containing experience of consistency and reliability that contrasts with all the disorientation, the displacement, the endless efforts to make a new home that never quite yield a secure sense of belonging....This is a collection in which I have been grateful to immerse myself.'

John Wheway, The High Window

'This book feels a little like an act of self-haunting ... like tender postcards from afar, addressed to the poet herself'

Michael Glover, The Tablet

'Colour combines with contemplation [...] The symmetry is elegant, and the collection is a sophisticated, original exploration of a self made in and by the new language'

Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

'I found these sonnets to be exquisite and remarkable, not only for Mimi Khalvati's formal virtuosity but also for her bold and brilliant charting of new ground, in exploring the energies of absence, silence and unknowing. The poet's ear in these poems is attuned not to obvious noise but to night sounds, faint traces, on those whose lives lack narrative or 'underscript'. These poems are playful, moving and brimming with a fierce intelligence., and in this collection, her ninth, Mimi Khalvati is writing at the very height of her lyric power.'
Hannah Lowe
'Poems of extraordinary rigour and sensitivity. I know of no other contemporary poet who combines, so consistently and so deftly, the formal requirements of metre and rhyme, with the poets' demand for truth-to-experience expressed in natural, unaffected speech.'
Maitreyabandhu
This brilliant poet's crab-apple tree imparts the same kind of gorgeous and devastating self-knowledge granted Eve by the biblical Tree of Life.
Rafel Campo, Boston Review
This open and generous readiness to engage with all realities and see their worth gives Khalvati her power... graceful accomplishment is always in the service of a fundamental seriousness.
Bernard O'Donoghue, Poetry London
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 Khalvati's writing draws on diverse worlds and poetic traditions, and enriches the dominant culture of British poetry...Intricate, sensuous and vulnerable...Mimi Khalvati's work will endure.
Moniza Alvi, Poetry Wales
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
Khalvati writes exquisitely nuanced lyrics of love and loss, which draw on childhood, motherhood and the natural world. These [The Meanest Flower] are tender poems in the English Romantic tradition.
No. 3 in 'The Ten Best New poetry collections' - Independent, 2007

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Child New and Selected Poems 1991-2011 Mimi Khalvati 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback Categories: 21st Century, Women Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (180 pages) (Pub. Nov 2011) 9781847770943 £12.95 £11.65 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Nov 2011) 9781847779151 £12.95 £11.65 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Excerpt Author Contents Awards Reviews 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 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 ... read more Awards won by Mimi Khalvati Winner, 2023 The King's Gold Medal for Poetry Winner, 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card (Afterwardness) Winner, 2014 Poetry Book Society Recommendation (The Weather Wheel) Winner, 2011 Poetry Book Society Special Commendation (Child) Short-listed, 2007 The T.S. Eliot Prize (The Meanest Flower) Praise for Mimi Khalvati 'This generous, expansive volume affirms Khalvati's place as one of the UK's most accomplished lyric poets.' Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian 'The marvel of these poems is in their pure lyric flow â like shining a torch around a dark room. Each poem is wonderfully adroit, capturing, often with child-like relish, the touch of the world.' Maitreyabandhu, Poem 'She has the ability to find the sublime in art, the capacity to transform things into something that seems lasting... single moments of light in the face of encroaching darkness.' Kwame Dawes, Poetry Review '... [m]ystical and down-to-earth, innovative and approachable, precise in visual detail but roomy in vision...' Carol Rumens, The Guardian 'Khalvati's method is never formulaic and is always open to experience.' W S Milne, Agenda 'What I find remarkable is how little ego there is in this exploration, how sensitively and empathetically Khalvati looks out to the experience of other people, mixing hers with theirs so that the two often become indistinguishable' Edmund Prestwich, The North 'This collection has so many layers and cross-currents. There are rich memories hiding here' D A Powell, Under the Radar 'Poetry of the highest order' John Wheway, The High Window 'What is particularly striking throughout the collection is how the poems are able to move through time in relation to one's age, life or nationality.' Anthony Anaxagorou, PBS Winter Selection 2019 'In so many of these poems, the images frame and enunciate the character of an exiles life with tremendous resonance. The recurrent, deeply traditional formal design of the Petrarchan sonnet grounds the collection and provides a containing experience of consistency and reliability that contrasts with all the disorientation, the displacement, the endless efforts to make a new home that never quite yield a secure sense of belonging....This is a collection in which I have been grateful to immerse myself.' John Wheway, The High Window 'This book feels a little like an act of self-haunting ... like tender postcards from afar, addressed to the poet herself' Michael Glover, The Tablet 'Colour combines with contemplation [...] The symmetry is elegant, and the collection is a sophisticated, original exploration of a self made in and by the new language' Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 'I found these sonnets to be exquisite and remarkable, not only for Mimi Khalvati's formal virtuosity but also for her bold and brilliant charting of new ground, in exploring the energies of absence, silence and unknowing. The poet's ear in these poems is attuned not to obvious noise but to night sounds, faint traces, on those whose lives lack narrative or 'underscript'. These poems are playful, moving and brimming with a fierce intelligence., and in this collection, her ninth, Mimi Khalvati is writing at the very height of her lyric power.' Hannah Lowe 'Poems of extraordinary rigour and sensitivity. I know of no other contemporary poet who combines, so consistently and so deftly, the formal requirements of metre and rhyme, with the poets' demand for truth-to-experience expressed in natural, unaffected speech.' Maitreyabandhu This brilliant poet's crab-apple tree imparts the same kind of gorgeous and devastating self-knowledge granted Eve by the biblical Tree of Life. Rafel Campo, Boston Review This open and generous readiness to engage with all realities and see their worth gives Khalvati her power... graceful accomplishment is always in the service of a fundamental seriousness. Bernard O'Donoghue, Poetry London 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 Khalvati's writing draws on diverse worlds and poetic traditions, and enriches the dominant culture of British poetry...Intricate, sensuous and vulnerable...Mimi Khalvati's work will endure. Moniza Alvi, Poetry Wales 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 Khalvati writes exquisitely nuanced lyrics of love and loss, which draw on childhood, motherhood and the natural world. These [The Meanest Flower] are tender poems in the English Romantic tradition. *No. 3 in 'The Ten Best New poetry collections' - Independent, 2007* You might also be interested in: The Meanest Flower Mimi Khalvati Collected Poems Sujata Bhatt Pure Lizard Sujata Bhatt	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! 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