Very Selected: Mimi Khalvati

£7.50

Like shining a torch around a dark room… 

This Very Selected pamphlet brings together short lyrics selected from Mimi Khalvati’s six previous collections, including several of her ghazals. 

The Soul Travels on Horseback is from a folk saying which tells us why, if we travel, it may take a day or two before we feel we have fully arrived: our soul, travelling on horseback, has yet to catch up with us. These poems inhabit that liminal space of longing or existential homesickness, while also being in love with the given world. Rather than trying to hold the page, they yearn to be weightless enough to become part of the surrounding air and its ever-changing light and shade.

Mimi Khalvati’s poetry is, in the best sense, ‘expectable’. She writes about love, memory, ageing, and the natural world. Many of her poems are in disciplined forms that still surprise and delight the reader. We trust this poet.
– Norbert Hirschhorn at London GripRead on here.

The marvel os these poems is in their pure lyric flow – 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

Description

Mimi Khalvati has published eight collections with Carcanet Press, including Child: New and Selected Poems, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith|Doorstop, 2013) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and The Weather Wheel (Carcanet, 2014) was a PBS Recommendation and Book of the Year in The Independent. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.