The Weather Wheel

In this, her boldest collection to date, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. Restricting herself in each poem to sixteen lines, set in couplets, Khalvati plays kaleidoscopic variations on this form, the lyric falling differently each time, yet the book as a whole retaining a powerful coherence. As the scene shifts from London to the Mediterranean to the Canaries, the poems gain resonance from each other with cumulative intensity, spinning connections across scale and distance. The Weather Wheel is a radiant celebration of the living world despite the loss that lies at the book's heart.