Mimi Khalvati's The Chine is...strong on a sense of places. the eponymous ravine at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, where the Iranian-born poet grew up, provides access to a double world: above, the facts; below, the dreams; out of the tension between the two come the poems. In the title sequence, Khalvati(b1944) naturally looks back at childhood, but, rather than isolating key events, she skilfully shows the past shifting and dissolving even as she contemplate sit. the lesson the place taught her, she suggests, was displacement, and with displacement came her attachment to language, which she traces in Writing Home: "under the crab-apple tree, taking root, / words in a mouth puckered from wild, sour fruit ." Art is not a charm against solitude, but it may help to see the matter clearly, though keeping faith with language may lend the poet more detachment than is easy to possess.

Finding no still place in which to rest, in the poem Middle Age Khalvati turns back to the present, watching life borne irresistibly forward, and noting that emotion, like physical energy, may be a finite resource: "how tired / we'd get, even of loving..." With eerie fascination she traces what it means to accept the work of time: "from where I am I catch the drift of it- / a wind that blows the other way. Or rather, / doesn't blow but being ever more easeful, / makes me see, as if in a glassy surface, / fingers dragged in the shallow of its wake."

Sean O'Brien, the Sunday Times, Sunday 11th August 2002