This may be one of Khalvati’s most interesting books, replete with some major if paradoxical developments. It has to be said that at first, I thought Khalvati had passed through the abstruse, metaphysical heart of the work represented by Mirrorwork and Entries on Light merely to return to earlier preoccupations. I began to miss the world of ‘Interiors’ with ‘the play of parallels…the verticals of harmonies, horizontals of melody and inbetween’ and of poems one could happily spend hours deciphering; and I began to miss the ever-vanishing horizons of entering light. Had a complex vision been abandoned? Was an evocation of an alignment with Wordsworth, the ‘meanest flower’ being what was left after the daffodils and the visionary gleam had withered, or fled, a sign of this? Worse still, finding the title poem and a parallel long poem shockingly easy to read, I wondered had Khalvati sold out to ‘easy access’ propagandists?
Was this the end of an ‘interesting’ Khalvati, to be replaced by a simple ‘populist’? Indeed, the brief summary on the jacket refers to a book of lyrics, elegies, songs and ghazals, to a poet who is ‘unapologetically Romantic’, to the ‘true voice of feeling’; this is, sui generis, a ‘poet with a heart’. The opening, title poem deals with a ‘love of childhood’ and ‘the garden in the garden. The garden is timeless’; the subsequent long poem ‘The Mediterranean of the Mind’ in memoriam Michael Donaghy, set in Spain, is indeed heart-wrenching.
Otherwise, there are some animal poems and no less piercing family poems; and there are the ghazals, with an interesting exposition of the form. This is the materiel of the generalist collection, not the world of J.H. Prynne; despite the title poem, ‘presences’ behind the book are the Antonio Machado of ‘Los Olivos’, set in Andalucia, as well as Lorca, quoted in the poem in memory of Michael Donaghy.
A central, driving paradox makes The Meanest Flower unusually interesting. On the one hand, key long poems invoke a hermeticism. In the title poem, there is reference to ‘Wordsworth’s hermit in the woods’ (from ‘Tintern Abbey’) who is implicitly surrounded by a family of flowers; there is confession by Khalvati of an ‘inability/ to imagine a larger world and one too sick’.
In the elegiac (and perhaps best poem) ‘The Mediterranean of the Mind’ there is eulogy for ‘a Mediterranean of the mind/ where, like the white ermita/ culminating in open ground, some white and holy destination/ hoves into view.’ On the other hand, the alternately chilling and thrilling songs and invocations in the early long poem ‘Plant Care’ which have evolved excitingly into the ghazals in this book reach out to a kind of universal music, to the impersonal personal, to the general hurt, to archetypal song, to a territory abandoned by poetry.
We read a poet for what is particular, peculiar to them, and for their evolution.The Meanest Flower thrives on a paradox. It blooms out of earlier work. Largely ignored by reviewers, even by the venerable TLS, the key poem in Khalvati’s first book In White Ink was the defiant ‘Plant Care’, printed at the end of the book. It is a poem of intricately detailed childhood, full of troubling stories in which ‘Every act is metaphysical’, a poem of impending aunts and ‘the devil in the garden’; Khalvati’s ‘hair is root and rush’ and ‘Cacti need little water’. It is interesting to read the new title poem and ‘Plant Care’ one after the other: it is as if one poem draws on, and then regenerates, the world of the other.
We see (sic) a return to particular roots; in ‘Plant Care’, the most interesting things are unromantic, unnerving, quasi-archaic, quasi-archetypal, the distorted nursery rhyme-type songs with a trace of Louis MacNeice.
I am thinking of his ‘Bagpipe Music’. ‘It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,/ All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow’ and the mad jig, the hallucinating invocation, the moving the chairs as the devil circles. For Khalvati: ‘You can drive the devil out of your garden, you can scold him away like a loon...’ (Perhaps Khalvati had also studied fruitfully Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ and Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo.) Intriguingly, in the ‘Ghazal: It’s Heartache’ and the first line: ‘When you wake to jitters every day, it’s heartache’ you can start to hear the W.H. Auden of ‘Five Songs’: ‘What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney;’ or ‘The Witnesses’. (1932). Khalvati is continuing to strive for some greater form of ‘essential English eloquence’ and of ‘complex song.’ She improves on Auden; with a better ear than his.
The Meanest Flower is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize.
Christopher Truman has been evolving a series of Zen-based black and white laser prints, some of which have been used in Sofia. Some counterpoint his poetry.
Reviewed: The Meanest Flower by Mimi Khalvati, Carcanet Press (Manchester), 2007, £9.95, ISBN:978857548686.