Mirrorwork - Mimi Khalvati

In Mirrorwork, her second collection, Mimi Khalvati takes the Islamic art of mirror-mosaic - found in palaces, barber shops, kebab houses - as metaphor. The shorter poems refract one another, the three long sequences act as a mirror triptych, their themes - of art, nature, domestic life and memory, east and west - drawing the other poems together.

In a mirror-mosaic you search for your reflection but can't find it whole, only flickering, variegated, fragmented, as on television when a pattern is played across a face to preserve anonymity, while the voice discloses what the picture conceals. In Mirrorwork Khalvati at once establishes a voice and questions its integrity. It is a book about becoming, as the poet's children leave home and she must find a changed self and purpose, a new space.

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.