Child: New and Selected Poems

By Mimi Khalvati

Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011 combines a generous collation of poems from Mimi Khalvati's five Carcanet volumes with previously uncollected sequences. She orders her work autobiographically, telling the stories of her life in four sections: childhood and early adulthood; motherhood; meditations on light; and love and art, circling back to childhood in her celebrated final sequence (The Meanest Flower'). The figure of the child stands at the centre of the book, appearing in many guises: the poet as a schoolgirl on the Isle of Wight, or in half-remembered later years living with her grandmother in Tehran; her two children, now grown up; children in art; and an enduring sense of oneself as a child that is never left behind. Here is the essential Khalvati: exquisitely nuanced, formally accomplished, Romantic in sensibility; rapturous and tender in response to nature, family and love. Her poems, David Constantine writes, 'say what it feels like being human, the good and the ill of it, with passion, tact and lightness.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Nov 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781847779151

Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six. She has lived most of her life in London. She has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Weather Wheel, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a book of the year in The Independent. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith/Doorstop Books 2013), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa, the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, and her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a major Arts Council Writer's Award. She is the founder of the Poetry School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.