This week's poem is by Mimi Khalvati, one of my favourite contemporary poets and also the subject of a "special request" from one of our recent Poem of the week posters, Poulter. I've made my choice from Khalvati's 1997 collection, Entries on Light, a book-length sequence of poems, all untitled, all subtly linked. They are both mystical and down-to-earth, innovative and approachable, precise in visual detail but roomy in vision. However well you may know the work, there is always something fresh to discover there. If you're new to it, this poem ("Everywhere you see her…") will, I hope, be a good starting point.
The word "Entries" suggests a diary, and, though meticulously crafted, the poems reflect the variations of a meteorologically typical English calendar, quick-firing through light, shade and the whole chromatic scale between. Someone has pointed out a resemblance to Constable's paintings; up to a point, that's true, provided we remember that Constable was not simply a narrator, and his light was more than physical light. Khalvati's poems are only passingly descriptions or records. In showing us "what the light was like" they show us how it felt, what memories were roused, how it read emotionally and intellectually. As well as water and sky, rooms and hillsides, we see how light plays on the "inward eye" – the poet's imagination.
Although Khalvati's work is steeped in the English tradition (Herbert and Wordsworth are presences here), there might be a connection with Persian poetry in the shaping of the sequence. Edwin Morgan, who wrote his own, marvellous "take" on Middle Eastern poetry in The New Divan (1977), usefully described, in his book Nothing Not Giving Messages, the open structure, and the sensation of exploring it: "In Arabic or Persian poetry they're rather fond of the idea that a "divan" as they call it, a collection of poems, is something you enter; you move around, you can cast your eye here and there, you look, you pick, you perhaps retrace your steps." There are myriad "entries" into, and passages through, Khalvati's sequence. Happily for new readers, many of the "Entries on Light" poems, including this week's choice, will be reprinted in her New and Selected Poems, to be published by Carcanet in November.
The poem I've chosen is a mysterious, impressionistic portrait, related to Monet's windswept figure of the "Woman with a Parasol". It's not "about" the Monet paintings, but the allusion helps us visualise the strange, dissolving quality of the poem's central image. "Everywhere you see her…" could signal a love poem, obsessed by a particular woman. Equally, it could be about "Everywoman". Her identity is unstable, because the weather of the receptive imagination constantly reshapes it. Monet himself painted two women with parasols - his wife and, later, his step-daughter. Khalvati's figure, like Monet's, seems at first to be composed of sky and wind. She's also kin to the rippling water-plants of the lily-pond, and to water itself: like a bird, she coasts "on diagonals". (I read "coast" as a verb as well as a noun). She might have stepped, or blown, in – out of an Irish "Aisling" poem. Although hardly an emblem of nationhood, she seems, like the "sky-woman" of the genre, a muse-figure. Perhaps she is poetry. Perhaps she is the light in human form.
The fluidity of her identity at the beginning suggests a parallel with the dawning of a poem. As her outline becomes clearer, and analogies accumulate, it's like seeing a poem take shape. "Something of yours goes through her, something/ of hers escapes." This is a wonderfully suggestive picture of the creative transaction, and maybe of perception in general. But the woman is soon to be grounded: her insistent hat-brim and her dallying among antiques lend her a worldly air, a place in society and time.
The poem's syntax changes to accompany the theme's development. Sinuous long sentences, with carefully timed line-breaks adding their own punctuation (Khalvati sometimes uses the line-ending as the grammatical equivalent of the comma) give way to brisker units, not always complete sentences. Towards the end of the poem, a movement of stops and starts produces the sense of hunting, dodging, hide-and-seek. Is the speaker the hunter, or the hunted?
Another Celtic hint recalls the Mabinogion, and the tale in which Blodeuwedd, a bride conjured by wizardry from the flowers of the oak, the broom and the meadow-sweet, is punished for marital treachery by demotion to an owl. The owl in this poem is only a brooch, but it has a piercing presence. The black eyes the woman "fingers" are senseless and lightless, hinting at the inhumanity of the greedily absorbent, unreflective surfaces of art.
Finally, the woman is freed from the claustrophobic Old Curiosity Shop where the poet has mischievously deposited her, and set again on the timeless hillside that is her element. But the idea that she is "on a slope" and "coming your way" continues to mingle notions of the predatory and playful. Her arrival in the flesh could mean anything from an epiphany to a catastrophe – possibly both. If she's inspiration, then she is the poet's most difficult, as well as most welcome, of guests.
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From "Entries on Light"
Everywhere you see her, who could have been
Monet's woman with a parasol
who's no woman at all but an excuse for wind –
passage of light-and-shade we know
wind by – just as his pond was no pond
but a globe at his feet turning to show
how the liquid, dry, go topsy-turvy, how far
sky goes down in water. Like iris, agapanthus
waterplants from margins where, tethered
by their cloudy roots, clouds grow underwater
and lily-floes, like landing craft, hover
waiting for departure, she comes at a slant
to crosswinds, currents, against shoals of sunlight
set adrift, loans you her reflection.
I saw her the other day I don't know where
at a tangent to some evening, to a sadness
she never shares. She wavers, like recognition.
Something of yours goes through her, something
of hers escapes. To hillbrows, meadows
where green jumps into her skirt, hatbrim shadows
blind her. To coast, wind at her heels, on diagonals
as the minute hand on the hour, the hour
on the wheel of sunshades. Everywhere you see her.
On beaches, bramble paths, terraces of Edwardian
hotels. In antique shops, running her thumb along
napworn velvet. A nail buffer. An owl brooch
with two black eyes of onyx. Eyes she fingers.
But usually on a slope. Coming your way.
Mimi Khalvati