Afterwardness

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived most of her life in London. She has published eight collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Weather Wheel, a Poetry Book Scoiety Recommendation and a book of the year in The Independent. Her pamphlet, Earthshine (Smith/Dorstop Books 2013) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Writer's Award, and she is the founder of the Poetry School, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society.

'I found these sonnets to be exquisite and remarkable, not only for Mimi Khalvati's formal virtuosity but also for her bold and brilliant charting of new ground, in exploring the energies of absence, silence and unknowing. The poet's ear in these poems is attuned not to obvious noise but to night sounds, faint traces, on those whose lives lack narrative or 'underscript'. These poems are playful, moving and brimming with a fierce intelligence, and in this collection, her ninth, Mimi Khalvati is writing at the very height of her lyric power.' - Hannah Lowe