Mimi Khalvati is not a ‘religious’ poet, a poet of conviction (even when it comes to conviction about her own life). She is not a ‘spiritual’ poet, overusing epiphany. She is a poet – to borrow a term from Georges Bataille – of ‘strong play’. Bataille distinguishes between weak play of mere recreation and strong play which is ‘characterised by sovereignty’ and ‘puts itself at risk’. According to the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han:

Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play […] Language as a medium of information has no splendour. It does not seduce. Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. They are characterised by an excess of the signifier; they are luxurious […] In poetry, language plays. Poems are magic ceremonies of language.¹

The publication of Khalvati’s Collected Poems – coinciding as it does with her eightieth birthday, and the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry – provides her readers with an opportunity to stand back from the particularities of each collection (over more than thirty years) to look at her work as a whole. Three qualities stand out: her formal inventiveness, lyric sensibility and poetic intelligence.

Byung-Chul Han’s ‘Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves’ is an apt description of Khalvati’s work. Form has always created content in Mimi’s poetry. Few contemporary poets are so at home in both metred and non-metred verse. She will move, often from collection to collection, from strict forms – sonnet, villanelle, Rubaiyat, ghazal – ...