- 180 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
As it journeys through the author's life, this collection by Anglo-Iranian poet Mimi Khalvati explores childhood, motherhood, loss, eroticism, and the natural world. Lyrical and resonant, this compilation—haunted by the child-self that is never quite left behind—combines some essential selections of Khalvati's previous work with new poems.The poems featuretraditional forms as well asexperiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form comprised of an unrhymed couplet.
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Yes, you can access Child: New and Selected Poems 1991–2011 by Mimi Khalvati in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Middle Eastern Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
IV
Vine Leaves
Even the vine leaves shot with sun
have shadow leaves
pressed close on them.
Even the vine is hanging
ones that seem like twos:
a top leaf
on a shadow leaf, its corner slipped,
like invoices in duplicate.
If I stood to look from the other side
with the light behind me,
would I still not see
how the top leaf shot with sun
might be the one that fails to fit
its duplicate
instead of
– standing where I do – seeing
how it is the shadow leaf that fails to fit
and failing
makes the one leaf seem like two
and being two, more beautiful?
The Love Barn
Remember the swallows – or were they
swifts? – in the love barn where the wooden
rail we peered over might have been
the height waves tip out of over
rocky pools or the bar of a certain
Sicilian café scattering waiters
like birds or the fence of a driveway
where lupins grow tall as you were
in the barnlight where we stood, leaning
over a railing, smelling the hay.
Ghazal
after Hafez
However large earth’s garden, mine’s enough.
One rose and the shade of a vine’s enough.
I don’t want more wealth, I don’t need more dross.
The grape has its bloom and it shines enough.
Why ask for the moon? The moon’s in your cup,
a beggar, a tramp, for whom wine’s enough.
Look at the stream as it winds out of sight.
One glance, one glimpse of a chine’s enough.
Like the sun in bazaars, streaming in shafts,
any slant on the grand design’s enough.
When you’re here, my love, what more could I want?
Just mentioning love in a line’s enough.
Heaven can wait. To have found, heaven knows,
a bed and a roof so divine’s enough.
I’ve no grounds for complaint. As Hafez says,
isn’t a ghazal that he signs enough?
Ghazal: To Hold Me
I want to be held. I want somebody near
to hold me
when the axe falls, time is called, strangers appear
to hold me.
I want all that has been denied me. And more.
Much more than God in some lonely stratosphere
to hold me.
I want hand and eye, sweet roving things, and land
for grazing, praising, and the last pioneer
to hold me.
I want my ship to come in, crossing the bar,
before my back’s so bowed even children fear
to hold me.
I want to die being held, hearing my name
thrown, thrown like a rope from a very old pier
to hold me.
I want to catch the last echoes, reel them in
like a curing-song in the ...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Table of Contents
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS
- Iowa Daybook
- The Streets of La Roue
- Afterword
- Night Sounds
- River Sounding
- Cretan Cures
- The Poet’s House
- Notes
- About the Author
- Also by Mimi Khalvati from Carcanet Press
- Copyright