When I was a child, I was sent to stay for a while at Broom Hall, my maternal Grandfather’s grey-stone, ivy-strewn Edwardian mansion on the southern edge of Sunningdale, Berkshire. I went there with some trepidation, for, as was well known, the house was haunted. Caught in the beams of car headlights coming up the drive, or on the mossy croquet lawn at dusk, a nun in her ‘habit’ could be seen. At other times, she walked the cold rooms above. For her, this stalking us was perhaps a kind of freedom, for she had endured a dark, agonising death, walled in the grounds of Broom Hall, about seven hundred years before I came to stay.
In 1200 a nunnery of Benedictine nuns called Bromhall Priory had been founded close by. Some time in the Middle Ages, a nun became pregnant by a monk. After being allowed to give birth to her lovechild, the young nun was immured in the Priory Walls as punishment for her sin of passion. It would seem her keening ghost haunted Broom Hall.
About 25 years after my visit to Broom Hall, I was attending the poetry workshop Camden Voices chaired by the redoubtable Dinah Livingstone. A poet called Mimi Khalvati started to introduce her poem ‘The Woman in the Wall’. Before long, I interjected: ‘I know that ghost!. I know all about her.’ Indeed, in Khalvati’s superb poem (shortened for Child) ‘there was nothing of her left but dust and ghost/ at dawn, at dusk, at intervals’ (p 37).
My visit was in the early 1960s. Left to my own devices for the day, I explored the grounds, surprising a vast terrifying frog in the rhododendrons. I felt impulses to festoon statues and garden urns with plants, and sunder impenetrable quiet. Thus, when I came to read Khalvati’s incomparable long poem Plant Care, I felt that I knew the territory backwards. Broom Hall also has similar atmospherics to Khalvati’s great work Interiors.
For the time-poor general reader, Khalvati’s Child:
New and Selected Poems 1991-2011 is worth buying, if only for the selections from the three works referred to in this review. However: I now have to issue a serious ‘critic’s warning’, which is that this presentation of Khalvati and her work made by the publisher is entirely diminutive, and ignores the essence of her genius: Khalvati is not an incidental poet of childhood for a Richard and Judy Breakfast TV show.
Child should have opened with a complete reprint of the long poems or sequences Plant Care, Interiors and Entries on Light. At her greatest, Khalvati is a poet of the seer exploring the alpha and omega of reality, a transfigured secular reality. Whilst there is a generous selection here from the extraordinary, Debussy-esque poem sequence Entries on Light, I was greatly perturbed at the omission of one of the best pages ever written by Khalvati, from Plant Care. It begins as follows:
You can drive the devil out of your garden, you can scold him away like a loon, but down by the pool where the eggs float, the frogs croak, you will find him again with a jam-jar, a crowbar, where the raspberry staked is pulped to a stain and strained for a raspberry fool. (p 80, In White Ink 1991) and it ends as follows: the devil walks behind you in the garden of your son.
The lines are so redolent of my times in the kitchen gardens of Broom Hall, I have often wondered if the ghost of the woman in the wall, who may have seen me there, got though to Khalvati.
From page 1 of this Selected, I went into doubt over this presentation of her work. Has her publisher given us a ‘lowest common denominator’ Khalvati?
Has the poet been ‘dumbed down’, to get sales? My Khalvati is a poet of ‘infinity music’, of le mystère, of abstruse parallels, of complex cadences, of liminal narratives, of ‘the feeling fields’ of an abstract painting.
Does the ‘new moral imperative’ of an appeal to a home-and-hearth cult of Blutsverwandte, of Kinder, work?
Or is it a terrible over-simplification and a betrayal of an exceptionally complex poet? With her Persian roots, Khalvati, born in Teheran in 1944 and educated in England, appears at times able to achieve some of the finest music in English ever written; sounding more English than the English, like an upper class Anglo-Indian born to the Raj, she can match the elegiac music of the Tennyson who wrote:
Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.
Born up-country in Malaya, Christopher Truman is a London poet and artist. reviews As a music critic, writing under the pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’, George Bernard Shaw was knowledgeable, discerning, and often bitingly funny at the expense of the amateur performer. My favourite piece of his, reprinted in GBS on Music by Penguin Books, is a review of a concert held in Richmond , in which he wrote of the ‘unredeemed villainy of those two amateur extremes, the man who never attends a rehearsal, but always turns up at the concert, and the man who attends all the rehearsals, and blenches from the concert.’ Perhaps the greatest moments of all, for the amateur singer, are the wonderful choral numbers in The Messiah (although as Shaw wrote, The Messiah is not all Hallelujah). There is something profoundly joyous about singing in a choir, especially when, as is the case with the local choir to which I now belong, participants are taken ‘on trust’, as it were.
Carcanet (Manchester 2012). Pbk,.162 pages. £12.95.