Mirrorwork
Regular price
€15.99
20th Century
A01=Mimi Khalvati
Author_Mimi Khalvati
BAME
Category=DCF
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Women
Product details
- ISBN 9781857541144
- Weight: 148g
- Dimensions: 216 x 140mm
- Publication Date: 27 Jan 1995
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In Mirrorwork, her second collection, Mimi Khalvati takes the Islamic art of mirror-mosaic – found in palaces, barber shops, kebab houses – as metaphor. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act as a mirror triptych, their themes – of art, nature, domestic life and memory, east and west – drawing the other poems together.
In a mirror-mosaic you search for your reflection but can't find it whole, only flickering, variegated, fragmented, as on television when a pattern is played across a face to preserve anonymity, while the voice discloses what the picture conceals. In Mirrorwork Khalvati at once establishes a voice and questions its integrity. It is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.
In a mirror-mosaic you search for your reflection but can't find it whole, only flickering, variegated, fragmented, as on television when a pattern is played across a face to preserve anonymity, while the voice discloses what the picture conceals. In Mirrorwork Khalvati at once establishes a voice and questions its integrity. It is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.
Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has lived most of her life in London. After training at Drama Centre London, she worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. She has published nine poetry 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, The Weather Wheel, a PBS Commendation and a book of the year in The Independent, and Afterwardness, a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She was a co-winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition 1989 and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa as the recipient of the William B. Quarton International Writing Program Scholarship, at the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, City University. She is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its three anthologies of new writing published by Enitharmon Press. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Award and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. In 2023 she was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.
