Afterwardness E-Book

Mimi Khalvati

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card.A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019Ever since her first Carcanet book, In White Ink (1991), Mimi Khalvati has been drawn to the sonnet form. In Afterwardness its pull became irresistible. She has created in this unprogrammatic series, mixing memory, history, daily life, all her intersecting geographies and cultures, a self-portrait in all her moods, anxieties and delights. The sonnet form is stretched in all sorts of fruitful directions. Just as she adapted the ghazal form to English use, here she puts the Petrarchan sonnet to striking, unfamiliar use, widening the possibilities of the form. The poems are rich with Khalvati's personal history, her Iranian origins, her long years in Great Britain. The poems play between cultures, ancestral and acquired.

Leseprobe

AFTERWARDNESS

MIMI KHALVATI

for Marilyn Hacker

CONTENTS

Title PageDedication  Questions Translation Handwriting Dictation Elocution Background Music Background Music (ii) Dreamers Afterwardness Scripto Inferior Cafés Jolanta The Brag Hide And Seek The Introvert House Outpatients Villajoyosa The Boy Dysphagia The Artist as a Child The Lesser Brethren Torbay Maria Old Stamping Grounds Chamaeleonidae The Colours My Mother Wore My Mother’s Lighter My Mother’s PortraitThe Courtyard Twelve Very Bush Cricket Reading under Trees Postcard from Crete The Street Friends House The Older Reader The Living Room Life Writing Eggs September The Ice Rink In Praise of the Sestet Night Writing ‘Petites Salissures’ One Summer Holiday Facades Physiognomy Smiles Homa My Sixth Birthday Party Junior School Production Azarinejad and Bear Mehrabad Airport Mehrabad Airport (ii) Vapour Trails  Notes Acknowledgements About the AuthorCopyright

QUESTIONS

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 else something has made the seatback grow.

You’re a normal child, if a bit bewildered,

struggling to push the feelings down, the questions,

the stillborn questions never to be answered,

stretching to see a sky that simply darkens,

flying away from all you know with you

and someone sitting next to you, but who?

the only ones not gone or disappearing.

It’s normal to feel trust. And you do, don’t you?

Trust is a kind of seat belt, stretching, shrinking,

a kammarband you’ll soon forget you’re wearing.