Under her light touch, each of Mimi Khalvati’s 56 sonnets evolves in a spontaneous-seeming way, like something between intimate speech and thinking aloud. Within her favoured form \u2013 two quatrains rhyming on alternate lines followed by two triplets which rhyme in various ways across the triplet division \u2013 she makes skilful use of different kinds of half rhyme, so full rhyme comes and goes as if naturally, rather than being a formal given.<\/p>\n
The arc of the book reflects the course of the poet\u2019s own life, starting with her exile from Iran and family at six, the loss of her mother tongue and her consequent need to learn English and find her place in a new culture. Its core is a deeply personal exploration of how one can adjust to such losses. However, what I find remarkable is how little ego there is in this exploration, how sensitively and empathetically Khalvati looks out to the experience of other people, mixing hers with theirs so that the two often become indistinguishable.<\/p>\n
We see this in \u2018Afterwardness\u2019, perhaps the most powerful of many fine poems, with its haunting pull between beauty and desolation. The octave presents exile as experienced by \u2018An eleven-year-old boy from Aleppo \/ whose eyes hold only things no longer there\u2019. The pine trees and pathways of the sestet refer back to the boy\u2019s imagined future memory of a traditional Middle Eastern garden constructed in the image of paradise, with four crossing paths, but the boy himself has disappeared. No doubt on one level what\u2019s replaced him is the poet herself, meditating on how she can live with her own parallel loss and on how it\u2019s one of the springs of her art, but because no particular speaker is identified the words can seem to speak for all artists and perhaps for all people living with a sense of indefinable losses of self to the past:<\/p>\n
Where do memories hide? the pine trees sing.
\nIn language, of course, the four pathways reply.
\nWhat if the words be lost? the pine trees sigh.<\/p>\n
Lost, the echo comes, lost like me in air. With the \u2018turn\u2019 between octave and sestet, speech dissolves into the patterned movement of song, a song moving like a dance with its repetitions and its hypnotic swaying between question and answer. A concrete situation dissolves into magic and myth, creating a shimmering interplay of feelings and thoughts that themselves move in and out of focus and are deepened by faint echoes that suggest inexhaustible reflections on both identity and art. The feeling balances between hope and despair because the last line\u2019s suggestion that the singing may be pointless (\u2018for nothing, no one, no where\u2019) is contradicted by the sheer beauty of movement and sound.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nThen sing, the pathways answer, sigh and sing
\nfor the echo, for nothing, no one, nowhere.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n