Entries on Light

Entries on Light, Mimi Khalvati’s third book, is a single poem, a series of meditations on light, on what light is and does, howas it changesit 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 alsoin short-phrased sectionsare put in mind of the flat skies of Hokusai. She is a poet in whose vision east and west join.