moira
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Karma: 3 |  | Mimi Khalvati
« Thread Started on Sept 16, 2008, 11:06pm » | |
Introduced by Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi
Farideh is a poet, translator and freelance journalist. Her first book of poetry was published when she was twenty-two. Her poems appear in the anthologies Contemporary Women Poets of Iran and Anthology of Best Women Poets. She is the author of The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry. She has extensively translated World literature into Persian. Among her several publications are: Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetaeva, Blaga Dimitrova, Iroslav Seifert, Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Women Poets of the World, Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry Pablo Neruda:(A Passion for Life), and The Beauty of Friendship: Selected Poems by Khalil Gibran. Her latest work is Anthology of American Poetry.
Mimi Khalvati
![[image]](http://shayepoet.com/conference/authors/mimikhalvati.jpg "[image]")
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran,Iran and grew up on the Isle of Wight where she went to boarding school. 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 started writing poetry while bringing up children. Her pamphlet, Persian Miniatures (Smith/Doorstop 1990) was a winner of the Poetry Business competition 1989. Her Carcanet collections include In White Ink (1991), Mirrorwork (1995), for which she received an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award, and Entries on Light(1997). Her Selected Poems was published in 2000 and her collection, The Chine, in 2002. Her most recent collection, The Meanest Flower, published by Carcanet in 2007, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Financial Times Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mimi is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its anthologies of new writing, Tying the Song(2000), Entering the Tapestry (2003) and I Am Twenty People! (2007), published by Enitharmon Press.
Mimi has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the Royal Literary Fund at City University, the International Writing Program in Iowa, and the American School in London. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2006 and she is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
She has performed her work extensively in Britain, Europe, Turkey and the USA, taking part in international festivals such as Poetry International at the South Bank Centre, British Council Tours abroad and a national tour of Contemporary British Poetry. She is a tutor for The Poetry School and a freelance creative writing teacher.
Song
I have landed
as if on the wing
of a small plane.
It is a song I have
landed on that barely
feels my weight.
Sky is thick with wishes.
Regrets fall down
like rain.
Visit me.
I am always in
even when the place
looks empty,
even though the locks
are changed.
--Mimi Khalvati
from The Chine,
Carcanet, 2002
ISBN 1 85754 547 8
from Entries on Light
And in the sea's blackness sank
wreckage of the day
its faces, voices, stops and starts
while to the surface rose
lights, lapping of waves
squawks of invisible birds
we heard as apertures
in a low dark sky –
the glittering crust that to an eye
seeing for the first time
evidence of man's night on earth
might be as intricate, luminous
as space to ours and wondrous
in its buoyancy, littoral
between depths and heights, electric
on its charts of glass
as peace might be
putting out without sound or sail.
--Mimi Khalvati
from Entries on Light,
Carcanet, 1997
ISBN 1 85754 329 7
Coma
Mr Khalvati? Larger than life he was;
too large to die so they wired him up on a bed.
Small as a soul he is on the mountain ledge.
Lids gone thin as a babe's. If it's mist he sees
it's no mist he knows by name. Can you hear me,
Mr Khalvati? Larger than life he was
and the death he dies large as the hands that once
drowned mine and the salt of his laugh in the wave.
Small as a soul he is on the mountain ledge.
Can you squeeze my hand? (Ach! Where are the hands
I held in mine to pull me back to the baize?)
Mr Khalvati? Larger than life he was
with these outstretched hands that squeezing squeeze
thin air. Wired he is, tired he is and there,
small as a soul he is on the mountain ledge.
No nudging him out of the nest. No one to help him
fall or fly, there's no coming back to the baize.
Mr Khalvati? Larger than life he was.
Small as a soul he is on the mountain ledge.
--Mimi Khalvati
from Selected Poems,
Carcanet, 2000
ISBN 1 85754 472 2
Blessing
for Hafez
Between the living and the dead,
May your memory be green.
In the book beside my bed,
May your signature be seen.
May your memory be green
For every lover, every spring.
May your signature be seen
Inscribed on every living thing.
For every lover, every spring,
Breathing clouds against the frost
Inscribed on every living thing,
Sees how every breath is lost;
Breathing clouds against the frost,
Because breath is always warm,
Sees how every breath is lost
In the one beloved form.
Because breath is always warm,
Hafez, yours ignites the dark.
In the one beloved form,
It is still a living spark.
Hafez, yours ignites the dark
In the book beside my bed.
It is still a living spark
Between the living and the dead.
--Mimi Khalvati
published in Wasafiri
20th Anniversary Issue, 2004
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