Mimi Khalvati is not a ‘religious’ poet, a poet of conviction (even when it comes to conviction about her own life). She is not a ‘spiritual’ poet, overusing epiphany. She is a poet – to borrow a term from Georges Bataille – of ‘strong play’. Bataille distinguishes between weak play of mere recreation and strong play which is ‘characterised by sovereignty’ and ‘puts itself at risk’. According to the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han:

Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play […] Language as a medium of information has no splendour. It does not seduce. Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. They are characterised by an excess of the signifier; they are luxurious […] In poetry, language plays. Poems are magic ceremonies of language.¹

The publication of Khalvati’s Collected Poems – coinciding as it does with her eightieth birthday, and the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry – provides her readers with an opportunity to stand back from the particularities of each collection (over more than thirty years) to look at her work as a whole. Three qualities stand out: her formal inventiveness, lyric sensibility and poetic intelligence.

Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves’ is an apt description of Khalvati’s work. Form has always created content in Mimi’s poetry. Few contemporary poets are so at home in both metred and non-metred verse. She will move, often from collection to collection, from strict forms – sonnet, villanelle, Rubaiyat, ghazal – to rapid on-the-fly impressions in free verse. ‘Our culture,’ writes Byung-Chul Han, ‘is hostile to pleasure and form.’ In such a context it will be difficult to appreciate the proficiency of Khalvati’s craft.

Khalvati is a lyric poet as opposed to a narrative one, and there are pressing reasons, as we will see, for her continued recourse to the lyric mode. For those coming to her poems for the first time, indeed for those who have long valued her lyric responsiveness, it is worth stressing that Khalvati places particular demands on the reader. She asks for a strenuous kind of tact – one that includes alertness to subtlety, allusion and observation, as well as an openness to finesse.

But it is Khalvati’s intelligence that is most often overlooked. She is a poet who thinks. Like all genuinely intelligent poets, Mimi is sceptical about intelligence – about ‘knowing’ and ‘pinning down’ and ‘stating’. Like Robert Frost, she is even sceptical about scepticism. But her poems, especially as she matures in the later collections, are instances of poetic thought. As Han puts it, ‘Thought dresses itself in figures. It is often squiggly. Calculations, by contrast, follow a linear path.’

It is in Afterwardness, her most recent collection (2019), that Khalvati’s intelligence finds its most satisfying and unified expression. Afterwardness is a book-length sequence, finding its way in rhyming Petrarchan sonnets. Khalvati returns again and again to the sequence as a strategy for interrogating memory and childhood. Afterwardness begins, tellingly, with ‘Questions’:

You’re smaller than you were or so you think.
You don’t remember sinking quite so low
in other seats. Something has made you shrink
or else something has made the seatback grow.

‘Questions’ is about the sensation of sitting on a plane as a small child flying to England. Mimi was born in Tehran in 1944. When she was six, she was sent to a girls’ boarding school on the Isle of Wight where she soon lost her native Farsi. ‘Questions’ continues:

You’re a normal child, if a bit bewildered,
struggling to push the feeling down, the questions,
the stillborn questions never to be answered

Afterwardness harks back to her first collection, In White Ink (1991). On her return to Iran when she was seventeen, she spent two-and-a-half years living with her grandmother, Telajune. Though Khalvati had no Farsi, and her grandmother only one English word, ‘lovely’, which she pronounced ‘luv-er-ly’ (like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady) they lived together in a happy, non-verbal world. When she was twenty-nine, Khalvati visited Tehran again with her then husband, the actor Paul Bentall. Working in theatre in Tehran meant she learnt to speak Farsi, though she was unable to read or write it. She made her final visit in 1986, after her grandmother’s death, when she was forty-two. It was around the time she started writing poetry. ‘Rubaiyat’, one of Khalvati’s most anthologised poems, is an elegy to her grandmother. It concludes:

‘Salaam, dokhtaré-mahé-man, salaam!’

‘Salaam, my daughter-lovely-as-the-moon!’
Would that the world could see me, Telajune,
through your eyes! Or that I could see a world
that takes such care to tend what fades so soon.

In White Ink was followed, in 1995, by Mirrorwork – at the heart of which is another sequence, this time in free verse: ‘Interiors’. Four longish poems, imitating the post-impressionist painter Edouard Vuillard’s tall, decorative panels, are followed by shorter studies in the manner of an artist’s pencil sketches. Khalvati’s first six years in Tehran are her Paradise Lost – a paradise she doesn’t remember, and can’t even be sure if it was a paradise or not. There is an absence at the heart of things, a void, or as she puts it in the final ‘study’ at the end of ‘Interiors’:

It was those glass-sprigged afternoons
the best part of us was born in.

Now, in the fading light – condensation
rising on the panes, snowing us in –
through a veil of milk
it aches, it glows, it passes…

Like many of Khalvati’s best poems, ‘Interiors’ inhabits a realm of unknowing. As much about what isn’t there as what is, it keeps circling back to an absence that ‘aches’, yes, but one that also ‘glows’ and, of course, ‘passes’. She has never known where she lived in Tehran as a child, where her family lived, whether they kept pets or not. No mother told her stories about her childhood. No father recounted the exploits of her family. All that was lost when she came to England at the age of six, arriving in 1950 to a country still recovering from the Second World War. Who met her at the airport – a child with no English, and so completely alone? She had no relatives in England. And she wouldn’t meet her mother again for another four years.

‘Interiors’ and ‘Rubaiyat’ evoke the absence at the heart of Mimi Khalvati’s life. The reader might assume this absence is one of traumatic loss and dispossession, whereas for Khalvati it is simply a void.

Khalvati told me that what she was asking herself throughout Afterwardness was: ‘What emotional effect did all this have on me? Not having memories. Not knowing the facts of my own life. Not having anyone who did know the facts that I could turn to. Having a mother I barely knew and didn’t miss.’ Even her own name was problematic, ‘Khalvati’ being pronounced by everyone around her and soon by her in an English so different from its pronunciation in Farsi. The complex of feelings surrounding this are captured in a key sonnet, ‘Chamaeleonidae’:

Why did I say I minded things I didn’t –
soul-making things I’d find too crude to name?
Or silently collude with heartfelt, well-meant
sympathy it seemed churlish to disclaim?
…
In whose name can I talk of roots, of ruptures?
Melding with backgrounds, we fade into yours –
muted, cryptic, old world chameleons.

All of these questions burn through Afterwardness: the sense of having no tribe, no audience that is naturally hers – she is neither Iranian (in the cultural sense) nor a person of colour with dual heritage born in the UK. Poems such as ‘Background Music (ii)’ talk of ‘dull bewilderment’ and ‘feelings of abandonment’ – arrested, dissociated feelings. ‘Afterwardness’ and ‘Scripto Inferior’ meditate on being someone whose backstory is virtually erased on the palimpsest.

Where do memories hide? the pine trees sing.
In language, of course, the four pathways reply.
What if the words be lost? the pine trees sigh.
‘Afterwardness’

In 2000, Khalvati’s Selected Poems was published, then, two years later with The Chine, demanding formal considerations returned, such as those that confront her ‘Villanelle’:

No one is there for you. Don’t call, don’t cry.
No one is in. No flurry in the air.
Outside your room are floors and doors and sky.

The resistance imposed by the villanelle pushes the poet to think again, and to think more deeply. What could a form mean that repeats two lines four times over? In everyday speech it would suggest someone bordering on obsession. The challenge of the villanelle is to arrive at the final couplet with those two refrain lines carrying a greater density of meaning than they did at the start.

Khalvati felt, as she grew up, a ‘complete lack of curiosity’ about her life. What might seem dislocating and traumatising to an outsider was ‘just how things were’ for her, a reality she never thought to question. And as time went on there were fewer and fewer people she could ask about her past.

A sense of temporariness pervades Mimi’s childhood. She never knew why she had been sent to England. She wasn’t even able to frame the question. But there was a sense that somewhere over the horizon was a place where she really lived, somewhere she’d be ‘at home’.

She did go back to Iran for a summer holiday when she was thirteen. She met her large extended family, but she had no idea who they were. Everything had to be filtered through her mother: how to behave, what to do, how to dress. Very much a foreigner in her own country, she was nevertheless warmly embraced by all.

‘Villanelle’, which memorializes one of Mimi’s few memories from her Iranian childhood, is also a subtly political poem. Khalvati’s politics often go unnoticed in her work, so integrated are they with her lyric voice. It is a whispered protest poem against the Thatcher years: ‘No one is there for you. Don’t call, don’t cry. / Outside your room are floors and doors and sky.’ Acquiring language was imperative for a small child arriving in England, effectively deaf and dumb, with nothing she could understand and nothing she could say. She had to learn quickly and, with that complex immigrant consciousness, master the language more completely than anyone else – so that no one would know she didn’t really know it.

The four, ten-line stanzas of ‘Writing Home’ from her fourth collection, The Chine, confirm her linguistic mastery while working in tension with the child’s voice.

                      Sorry sorry sorry
I can’t write anymore goodbye love Mimi
I wrote after only four lines to Mummy.

There’s no irony in that. I was six.
Right from the start, home was an empty space
I sent words to. Mapped my world, tried to fix
meanings to it.

Along with the urgent practical need to learn the language came the majesty of the language, especially of English poetry. ‘The poetic principle returns pleasure to language through a radical break with the economy of the production of meaning’ (Byung-Chul Han again). Mimi’s love of English, its ravishing sounds, is wonderfully expressed in ‘Listening to Strawberry’, dedicated to her English teacher, Aubrey de Selincourt:

I knew it as the poetry I could never hear
without his voice to give it utterance
and the way it ran inside me was clearer,
closer, than the way it ran in others

though they loved it too, owned it too
but owning so much else, loved it that much less.

Khalvati’s experience of having to learn the language connects, in later life, with her feeling of poetic apprenticeship, her passion for prosody and the demands of both metrical and free verse. The Chine was followed in 2007 by The Meanest Flower, which contains nine ghazals, a short form originating in amatory Persian poetry.

When you wake to jitters every day, it’s heartache.
Ignore it, explore it, either way it’s heartache.
Youth’s a map you can never refold,
from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it’s heartache.

The closed couplets of ‘Ghazal: It’s Heartache’ are completed by the refrain (radif), which is immediately preceded by the monorhyme (qafiya) sewing the couplets together. When Khalvati started publishing ghazals, people assumed they came so naturally to her because she’d grown up with them and listened to them being sung. In fact, she only became aware of the form in her sixties. The ghazal was no more natural to her than the pantoum, a Malay form, would have been. What excited her was what the ghazal could ‘allow’ into English poetry.

This highlights a central concern: enlarging and challenging poetic practice. The Meanest Flower – with its flower-lyrics, ghazals and sonnet sequences – is anti-ironic in a poetic context that emphasised ironic tropes. The ghazals in particular are Khalvati’s way of re-introducing the ecstatic voice into English-language poetry. The questions that fascinated her were: what kind of thought could be encapsulated in closed couplets? What demand does the ghazal, with its monorhyme and refrain, put on the syntax? What musical phrasing could bear that degree of repetition?

All the themes from her previous books find expression in Afterwardness – a remarkable, compendious collection in which each poem acts like one facet of a great jewel. A major theme treated, not lightly but quietly, tenderly, it contains – within its profusion of absences, joys and heartbreaks – Vuillard’s ‘petites salissures’ (his ‘little daubs’), her mother’s ‘faux tortoiseshell’ lighter, the initial strangeness of the word ‘very’, and the first egg she ever drew.

One of its sonnets, ‘The Lesser Brethren’, even touches on the political and religious assumptions readers might have about a poet born in Iran. Writing about herself in the third person, she says:

Although she barely knew at school, at seven,
what a Muslim was or what Islam meant,
she proudly wrote: ‘I know I’m not a Christian’,
reassuring her mother, ‘but for Lent

I have given up saying Honestly.’

The collection finishes, as it started, with an airplane. Not the one that brought her to the UK as a six-year-old but those now seen ‘shining in the firmament’ high above her:

It only takes a trigger, a single flight
in childhood, for example, early trauma,
to stretch the bare bones of the aftermath

into a lyric void beyond the finite
and knowable, a via negativa
cruising at altitudes on plumes of breath.

With the publication of Khalvati’s Collected Poems, the reader can follow the poetic integrity of her thought as well as the seriousness (in the best sense) of her ‘strong play’. She is not, as I said, a narrative poet who tells a story with helpful signposts; she is rarely given to making statements; and she is never sentimental. Her poems demand sensitivity to absence as well as presence. She would agree, I think, with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze when he wrote, ‘What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.’² As such, Mimi Khalvati’s work adds to the civilitas (graciousness, courtesy, modesty) of modern poetry.


NOTES

¹   Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals (Polity, 2020).
²   Gilles Deleuze, ‘Mediators’, in Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997).