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The Chine is Mimi Khalvati’s fifth volume of poetry and is breathtaking in its range and artistry. She writes from a deep understanding of poetry and its techniques, using a wide variety of traditional forms – sonnet, villanelle, sestina, terza rima and others, as well as free verse – and a flexible iambic pentameter line, all of which she makes new. Tone and attitude are as varied as form, by turn witty, playful, sad, intimate, passionate. Many of these poems read like discoveries of something that already exists, that reveals itself through form and music. Her imagination is exuberant, creating images that proliferate from other images and allow the poem to grow organically; at the same time, the poems are artefacts, shaped by a wonderful control of syntax, the line of thought that is the backbone of the poem. The volume is in three sections, the first centred on the poet’s childhood, the second on family relationships and the third on aspects of love.

The ‘chine’ of the title poem acts as a metaphor that resonates throughout the volume. Mimi Khalvati was born in Iran but was sent to school on the Isle of Wight when she was six; the poems in the first section, in particular, draw directly on this experience of division between two countries and two languages. The poems focus on feelings of displacement and exile in a way that goes beyond the merely local and personal. 

This is exemplified in the title poem, where the poet has returned to the Isle of Wight as an adult. The chine, here, is a metaphor for the rift between present and past, both the vast time-span of geology and the smaller span of one human life, and also for the two parts of a child’s – and adult’s – life, the upper, everyday world and the deeper level of the unconscious and the imagination. These are vividly evoked:

                                   in an upper world that turns
      beachfronts into toytowns, patches of moss
      into stands of miniscule trees, no railing
      is not a harp, no rung a wind might play on
      something other than its maker intended

whereas

        in the lower world we dream. We listen.
      Not for water which is the sound of listening
      or for schoolgirls passing above unseen.
      Under lawns, hotels, we sit hours midstream,
      crouched under a hundred blankets. If eyes
      were ears, we’d hear the very mud-bed thicken,
      rise in little mounds where the water’s clean.

The tone of the poem – quietly, almost impersonally elegiac – is set at the beginning: ‘To be back on the island is to be / cast adrift’ – with its echo of ‘To be or not to be’ – somewhere that is both present and past, beautiful and lonely:

                                               Not a ship,
      not a gull, and the sky in its slow revolve
      winding the Isle of Wight with a giant key.

And the poem itself seems to describe a sweeping circle through its ten stanzas, beginning and ending in mist, as the poet from her vantage point on Keats’ Green notices how

        there, at the bend, where the light’s so bright
      and people walking down the steep incline

      pause at the top before walking down, black
      against the blaze before their torsos sink,
      something vanishes, there, where the path drops
      and a young boy comes running down the hill.
                                        Never, O God, to be afraid of love
      is inscribed on a new bench where I sit,
      facing the headland with its crown in mist.

Loss of home and language are treated in two of the other poems in this section in the context of writing letters home from boarding school. Writing Home, subtle though seemingly simple, written in rhymed ten line stanzas, evokes a more personal feeling of loss and sadness as the six year old attempts to ‘trace / highlights someone could follow’ about her life in her letters home, although ‘right from the start, home was an empty space / I sent words to.’ Here, language can be baffling, like the crab-apple tree whose ‘apples
can’t be eaten, crabs can be planted’; later, she becomes aware of the wider rift between the political events taking place in the area she was born in and ‘the small world of a girls’ school in England’:

                                 It was the fifties. Suez,
      Mossadegh, white cardies, Clarks sandals. And,
      under the crab-apple tree, taking root,
      words in a mouth puckered from wild, sour fruit.

The other of these poems, Writing Letters, is a sestina in which the
repeated end-words – letters, addresses, name, countries, between, alphabet – carry the gist, the song of the poem. It starts with a close-up of small children writing home to ‘addresses gone cold as a name / no one could pronounce in an alphabet / with no k-h’, and ends with the adult’s sense of permanent loss:

                                     In an alphabet
      of silence, dust, where the distance between
      darling and dear is desert, where no name
      is traced in the sand, no hand writes love letters,

      none of my addresses can tell between
      camp and home, neither of my countries name
      this alphabet a cause for writing letters.

The Chine is both a volume of poetry and a book about language
and poetry. Sometimes this concern is explicit; in The Wishing Tree, the first poem in the sequence The Inwardness of Elephants, the poet has been given a wishing tree for Christmas. She wonders,

      Where do those poems go, the ones
      we wake from, take back to sleep and oblivion?
      In what book have they been written?

      How deep and dark the book, how full,
      how cavernous – a book of all the ages,
      grey fish crossing the open page.

The wishes are ‘like silver fish’, the tree, ‘a poem, a red heart beating in a well’. One of the wishes includes, ‘And may your God hold you / in the palm of his hand’, linking for the poet, Iran, God and friendship; the poem ends:

      My wishing tree’s gone dark. Gone the way
      those poems go. Underwater it bursts into flame.
      On it is hung my God, my friends, their names.

It is also implicitly a book about poetry in the way it demonstrates the deep sources of the creative imagination and the poet’s craft in the sheer virtuosity and variety of the poems. The Fabergé Egg, for example, is a debate about creativity, about the relation of form to content, of life to art, between the poet, the raw materials of the jewel-encrusted Lilies of the Valley Easter Egg, and its maker, written in four ‘nightingale’ stanzas, that is, written in the stanza form Keats uses in his ode. In Moving the Bureau, we see how a poem that at first seems light, playful, witty, can move effortlessly into something more profound and reflective.

Poetry is a risky business. Khalvati takes these risks and creates poems that live. Her lyric voice, which often carries such a deep charge of sadness, is unegotistical and restrained; the poetry draws attention to its content, its music, rather than merely showing off its undoubted technical skill. Humane and generous, these are poems to read again and again; each re-reading will reveal further depths and subtleties. The Chine should establish Mimi Khalvati as one of the foremost poets writing today.