Esteemed Carcanet
poet,
translator and
PN Review contributor
Marilyn Hacker shares her thoughts on one of her favourite Carcanet titles.
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It is a joy to have
Mimi Khalvati’s
New and Selected Poems, with their simple and resonant , and yet passing-strange title,
Child. Khalvati’s is a poetry, like Vuillard’s or Bonnard’s canvases or Persian miniatures, in which ostensible subject and ground are worthy of equal attention, where each word, accent, metaphor, resonance or full rhyme, play a necessary part and merit notice. Hers is a poetry in which the largest themes – exile, mortality, war, maternity, the intersection of cultures – are evoked and limned by means of bright, significant detail.
Khalvati’s attention to small things, the color of a primrose petal, the intense sweetness of white mulberry, the ingredients of a stuffed aubergine dish, a black hair on a bathroom tile – is so focused and accurate that a reader can almost forget the power of synthesising intelligence and craft that has been brought to bear in limning and juxtaposition. After reading or rereading one of her poems, implications and repercussions of the detail, on a persona, on a history, continue to resonate, indeed, as they do in reading a passage in Proust.
