Description

Entries on Light, Mimi Khalvati's third book, is a single poem, a series of meditations on light, on what light is and does, how--as it changes--it invents and reinvents the things we see, are and were, how it inscribes our shadows and our feelings. The sea- and sky-scapes of these poems are vivid: dawn, storm, dusk, the pewtery or the bright mid-day. Each demands a different syntax, a distinctive rhythm and rhyme. Mimi Khalvati has always had a well-trained eye; she is also formally among the most resourceful poets writing today, able to close her lyrical moments with resonance and, when necessary, to leave a stanza open to the changes of the weather. If at times we think of Constable in the billowing movement of her fuller stanzas, we also--in short-phrased sections--are put in mind of the flat skies of Hokusai. She is a poet in whose vision east and west join.