 |
| Mimi Khalvati |
In today's archival contribution, the poet, teacher and lecturer Mimi Khalvati discusses themes of motherhood and authorship in the work of a fellow poet. In Khalvati's latest book, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, motherhood and the figure of the child are, in their many guises, central themes. Child will be published next month by Carcanet Press and is available to pre-order now.
Today's post is taken from Poets on Poets (ed. Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt), which was published in 1997 by Carcanet, in association with Waterstones. In this book, nearly a hundred of the finest modern poets make a personal choice of the work of poets of the past and describe briefly the reasons for their choices. Poets on Poets is available from our website now.
Today's post is taken from Poets on Poets (ed. Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt), which was published in 1997 by Carcanet, in association with Waterstones. In this book, nearly a hundred of the finest modern poets make a personal choice of the work of poets of the past and describe briefly the reasons for their choices. Poets on Poets is available from our website now.
Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), mother of American poetry, has above all been celebrated for poems inserted posthumously into the second edition of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), from which I select; I have added a poem from the 1897 edition.
'The Author to Her Book' [reproduced below] says as much about mothering as about authoring. The idea of books as children is familiar, of writing as single-parenting less so, but of sending children out into the world as a form of publishing, rare.
Her love poems to her husband have the grace that a sense of divine union is privy to. In these, and in 'A Letter to her Husband', [...] which has the line 'If two be one, as surely thou and I, / How stayest thou thee, whilst I at Ipswich lie?' I hear - along with Sidney, Donne, the Metaphysicals - the voice of Rumi: 'This is the greatest wonder, that thou and I, sitting here in the same nook, / Are at this moment both in Irak and Khurasan, thou and I.'
The simplicity of 'To My Dear and Loving Husband' was perhaps fresher to her contemporaies than the elaborate wordplay of 'Another' [not included here; reproduced in Poets on Poets]. For me, the reverse is true - surprised by the mullet I last met in Catullus being thrust, along with radishes, through the flesh's open gate. But it was the sixteenth-century French poet Du Bartas, a much derided influence, who gave Bradstreet her mullet and mate.
Among her elegies this, for Simon, the third grandchild lost, I find the most moving, in its faltering faith, that equivocal 'Let's'.
'Verses upon the Burning of our House', transcending its Puritan aesthetic to strike that intimate note we sound so frequently today, I include to concur, with her, that 'there is nothing that can be sayd or done, but either that or something like it hath been done and sayd before.'
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.
In this array ’mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critic's hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
 |
| Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011 by Mimi Khalvati |