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The Review - BOOKS
Published: 20 March 2008

Mimi Khalvati

More of a mouse than a monster

AS Londoners, we live inside the “grandest and most complicated monster on the face of the earth”.
That, at least, was the belief of the Romantic composer Mendelssohn. As propagators of the English language, says Mimi Khalvati, we stand shoulder to shoulder with another great supposed chimera: poetry.
The Iranian-born poet ventures deep inside the belly of the beast next Thursday for Grand Monsters – a free day-long poetry event at Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road – to prove the much-feared bombast of the medium is no more than a hollow threat.
“People are frightened of poetry, as though there’s some sort of secret information that they don’t have access to,” she explains.
“Everyone is obsessed with the meaning – I’m trying to show that sense is as much in the sound of something.”
Ms Khalvati will explore a range of
different poems in her noon workshop, with the aim of reading poetry “for its music, the sounds of it… for its ambiguities”.
Fellow prosodists Martha Kapos, Anna Robinson and Simon Armitage will approach their daily bread from other angles; Armitage’s new collection, Out of the Blue, will also receive its launch on the day.
“I think quite often poetry can seem impenetrable or obscure,” sats Khalvati. “I hope to show it more as a mouse than a monster.”
SIMON WROE

• Grand Monsters is at Foyles Bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, WC2, on Thursday March 27. To book call Enitharmon Press on 020 7482 5967 or email: info@enitharmon.co.uk

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