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last update:
 
13 Oct17

Mimi Khalvati photo e-mail Mimi
Mimi Khalvati website
 
Mimi at Desperado Literature
 
listen to poem
The Valley
 

poetry favourites:
Arvon Foundation
British Council
Carcanet
Poetry School
Smith|Doorstop

 

and shop elsewhere…
pamphlet (forthcoming) –
“Very Selected Poems” Smith|Doorstop;
 
collections –
“The Weather Wheel”,
“Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011”,
“The Meanest Flower”,
“The Chine”,
“Entries on Light”,
“Mirrorwork”,
and
“In White Ink”,
Carcanet
 

 

 

this poet is taking part in the poetry tREnD project

 

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up in England. She has published eight collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
 
She was poet in residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships with the Royal Literary Fund at City University and at the International Writing Program in Iowa. She is also the founder of The Poetry School. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Writer’s Award and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.
 
Her most recent collection, The Weather Wheel, is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Her new pamphlet, Very Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Smith|Doorstop Press in 2017.
 
 
Comment:
 
on The Meanest Flower:
 

Mimi Khalvati is one of the most poignant and graceful poets writing in England currently. She has been a major influence on the use of the ghazal but she is far more than that. 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. Whether the poems are sonnets, ghazals or apparently light quatrains the 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

 
 

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

 
 
on The Chine:
 

Mimi Khalvati is a prolific and courageous poet who has produced what for some would be a lifetime’s body of work in a short decade. The Chine, her fifth book, is a marvel of generosity, which mirrors the contours and contradictions of the poet’s history.

 

Marilyn Hacker

 
 

Humane and generous, these are poems to read again and again; each re-reading will reveal further depths and subtleties. The Chine should establish Mimi Khalvati as one of the foremost poets writing today.

 

Mary MacRae, Magma

 
 

I am convinced that while we may tire of brasher voices, Mimi Khalvati’s work will endure.

 

Moniza Alvi, Poetry Wales