Kathryn Southworth reviews The Weather Wheel by Mimi Khalvati. Carcanet (Manchester 2014). Pbk. 96 pages. £9.95.
Mimi Khalvati’s new collection of poems is a celebration of the natural world and our place in it. Whilst the setting varies from London to Marrakesh and the Canaries, there is a profound unity to this book’s images, themes and moods, the savouring of life through landscapes and living creatures, resonating with the death of Khalvati’s mother, poignantly woven through.
Khalvati is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a previous collection was shortlisted for the prestigious T. S. Eliot prize. Her range of cultural reference is extensive but she writes very much in the English Romantic tradition. The T. S. Eliot nomination was for The Meanest Flower, the title a reference to the object which evoked for Wordsworth in his ‘Immortality’ ode ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’.
Yet there is nothing grandiose, or overly mystical about these poems. Their intensity lies in a calm simplicity which has the ability, as Shelley put it, to ‘mark the before unapprehended relations of things’, the external world providing numerous correspondences with humanity. It is no wonder one of the poems is called ‘Similes’ since, for Khalvati, ‘Everything is always like something else. Each makes love to the other.’ So, in the poem ‘Earthshine’, the phenomenon of seeing the ‘new moon in the old moon’s arms’ is movingly described as a pietà. It is in such contemplations of the skies, she says, that ‘we come back into our moral being’.
The tinier the tangible ‘things’, animal or meteorological, the more touching is their correspondence. Khalvati begins the collection with a poem examining, with respectful attention and tenderness, a dead mouse, ‘barely as long as the line I write in’, whilst the second poem makes the connection between humans and our smallest primate, the mouse lemur. In the next poem, in an extended poetic conceit, the sun becomes a sparrow, the detritus from the biblical ‘numbered hairs’ of the poet’s head providing an imaginary nest.
Such comparisons are not merely fanciful but culturally rooted and felt. The poet yearns for the sun to warm her skin: ‘Be sociable,’ she urges, ‘stay awhile on my flaking sill, hop right in’. Later, meditation on a snail recalls old age and its ‘snail-slow shrivelling’ but the snail is told to ‘savour every inch’. Death itself is almost imperceptible: just a further degree of stillness.
We are invited to see, as though for the first time, the fleeting ephemera of the natural world: sun, dust, snow, and how they act on all our senses. Snow, for instance, in itself silent, on contact ‘creaks’ and in ‘The Swarm’ is seen as a collection of gnats, specks flying too fast and disappearing without achieving the ‘sanctity in repose’ of fallen snow, ‘like flakes on the tongue at the point of recognition’. The poet tries to apprehend them but ‘They died as they landed, riding on their own melting as poems do’, and in hours of observing she might have seen ‘nothing more than I do now, /an image, metaphor, but not the blind imperative that drove them’. The act of imaginative apprehension, then, must be sufficient in itself in recording such liminal states of existence.
The weather wheel of the book’s title suggests the changing round of weather, seasons and emotions. Her mother’s death is the poet’s personal ‘November’ and she recalls curling ‘like a foetus on the side of my heart’ without the person who was her ‘compass, /my almanac and sundial, drawing me arcs in space’. Then she ‘took up the stick’ to hobble on in life where, as she says in one of the poems set in Marrakesh, ‘there is no accounting for joy, the way it bubbles in the most arid/of deserts’. In the beautiful poem ‘The Waves’ Khalvati finds moving symbols for an intangible but profound attachment to life:
Every day the world is beloved by me, the seagull eager for its perch. I woke this morning to a darkened room, my soul stabled at the gate. We grow older, quieter, hearing degrees of movement, distance, and the dead would listen if they could to the voices of the living as bedrock listens to the ocean.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice-Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. Now retired, she lives in Camden Town, London.