Born in Tehran, Iran, and brought up on the Isle of Wight, where she attended boarding school from the age of six, Mimi Khalvati has lived most of her life in England. Afterwardness is her ninth collection with Carcanet, elegantly produced, with a cover picture of ‘Children in a Room’ by Edouard Vuillard.
Afterwardness is a series of 56 modified Petrarchan sonnets that mix personal and geographical histories, memory, family, religion and cultures, ancestral and acquired. Khalvati probes meaning and language, loss, recovery, family. There is an unprogrammatic approach with no overt forcing of themes that allows the reader to shape their own perspectives. Khalvati takes you with her on something rather like a meditative walk, where the reader can allow their thoughts to roam freely amongst narratives and images without being forced into any specific direction. Her dual tongue is evident with Persian and personal shadows and diverse poetic traditions.
The opening poem propels you into the world of the child migrant, on the airline flight. ‘You’re smaller than you were or so you think. / You don’t remember sinking quite so low / on other seats. Something has made you shrink / or something else has made the seatback grow.’ And the child’s trust, which is ‘a kind of seatbelt, stretching, shrinking,’. We then move into language and translation, where ‘in Kacic Square’, children are ‘throwing languages in rotation – / their own, a new one, being made aware / as they leap, drop, pick, catch, of translation.’ This sonnet ends with playful yet haunting echoes: ‘to chip, chirp, chirp; sparrow, kittiwake, crossbill, / shrike and even bulbul to learn, learn, learn.’ Khalvati has a delicate touch in her use of form. It never obtrudes, and I believe will satisfy those who do and don’t admire the sonnet form. You hear the music, as sublime as Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. It seems easily done, but the more I looked, the more I realised how skilful this writing is.
The themes of this sequence range across places, including Torquay, memories of the Isle of Wight, Crete, the Friends’ Meeting House in London, an ice rink. They intersect belonging and individual stories, such as Ali Kemal – the murdered Turkish politician who was Boris Johnson’s great-grandfather, fishermen, artistry, religion, writing at night, a summer holiday, hidden immigrants, her mother, Vuillard, and even eggs. The contrasts between humanities emerge, a ‘Junior School Production’ is opposite ‘Azarinejad and Bear’, where Bear’s story is, possibly, the children’s as well. In the poem ‘Handwriting’, a line of ‘c’s’, in the ‘scaffolding’ of the alphabet, illustrates Khalvati’s virtuosity with imagery.
Griefs appear as cultures blend. ‘In Background Music’ after reading in a café, listening to Billie Holliday, watching Shaun Evans (and John Thaw) as Morse, hearing Puccini, Tosca, then ‘your heart breaks open a dungeon door / and griefs like prisoners crouched on the floor / bestir themselves and infant griefs like dolls / sleep through a bell that tolls and tolls and tolls.’ The title poem, ‘Afterwardness’, deserves special attention. Here we see : ‘An eleven-year-old boy from Aleppo, whose eyes hold only things no longer there – a citadel, a moat, safe rooms of shadow, ‘afterwardness’ in his thousand yard stare –’ In her final poem of the sequence, Khalvati returns to the idea of flight, but now watching vapour trails in the sky. She reflects: ‘It only takes a trigger, a single flight / in childhood, for example, early trauma, / to stretch the bare bones of the aftermath / into a lyric void beyond the finite / and knowledgeable, a via negativa / cruising at altitude on plumes of breath.’ In this highly original, moving collection, Khalvati crafts fresh, lively, penetrating, and invariably intelligent connections. It shows her at the height of lyric abilities. Her themes are universal, relevant across upheavals, small and large; wars; natural disasters; tragedies; relationships. To me it speaks even in these times, which Khalvati could not have foreseen, with the challenges of lockdowns, isolations and losses during the coronavirus pandemic. An outstanding sequence that will inspire and endure.
Danielle Hope is a poet, translator of Italian poetry and also a doctor working in London. She is widely published and one of her poems featured on the London Underground. www.daniellehope.org