Every day the world is beloved by me, the seagull eager / for its perch. I woke up this morning to a darkened room, my soul stabled at the gate …

IT’S the end of October, the last night of summer time — from tomorrow, the clocks will go back and we’ll be in darkness earlier every evening. Appropriate, then, that I’m on my way to a celebration of Mimi Khalvati’s new collection of poems, from which I’ve quoted above: firstly because it’s called The Weather Wheel, and spins us through our heartscapes in all their seasons, and secondly, because it is, as its cover copy claims, “a radiant celebration of the living world despite the loss that lies at the book’s heart.”

Mimi’s last book, Child, was a splendid volume of new and selected poems; paradoxically, it was published in 2011, just before her mother, a talented painter, died. This new collection ends with a ghazal of loss:

“Let them be, the battles you fought in silence / Bury your shame, the worst you thought in silence.”

Speaking of loss. On my way to Bethnal Green, I’m reading the words of a poet who died just a week or two ago: Carolyn Kizer. In that odd bond that readers and writers have, I’d had Kizer’s collected poems, Cool, Calm and Collected, beside my bed for several weeks: partly because Kizer, the last of a brilliant generation of female poets that included Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin and Adrienne Rich, was foremost among them in a cosmopolitanism that included Asia and its languages (I believe she studied Chinese for many years).

(I’m reminded of a conversation Mimi and I had about language on a winter’s night at the end of the last millennium. I, passionate about Urdu since my 30s, was attempting some kind of reconciliation with the language. Mimi, tiring of debates about bilingualism she couldn’t share, said then that she was searching for the lightness and transparency of water in her new verses, a quality she admired in the Italian poet Leopardi, whose work I could read in the original, but she only knew in translation.)

Kizer had a long connection with Pakistan, and notably translated Faiz into English. Not primarily a translator, her output of translations was inevitably small, but shows us how Anglophone poets gain from the influence of other languages and their contexts. Unusually, Kizer had also included in her collection an essay about her return trip to Pakistan in 1969, after an absence of about four years. The voice is perhaps quite different from her poetry: it has the bemused, indulgent pitch of someone who is both fascinated and somewhat exasperated by the foreign culture of a country which is quite definitely, from her American perspective, a backward third-world country. And yet she constantly attempts intimacies: with its people, its streets, its monuments and its food. What alarms me about her prose piece today is its prescience: she saw, and foresaw, the rise of fundamentalism, and asked if that was the world our children and grandchildren would inherit. I wonder what she felt when, in the last years of her life, she saw the rise of extremism in countries that were barely part of the international discourse at the time in which she was writing; a time when soldiers of her country had flooded Vietnam. I wonder whether she questioned, then or later, the role her own native USA had played and would continue to play in the unravelling of the Pakistani dream.

On the train, I’m looking at her translations of Faiz’s poems about the war for Bangladesh and its aftermath. I’m going to Dhaka in November, as is Mimi, to launch our new books at the literary festival there, and somehow I want to carry these poems with me in translation. But as I walk away from the station, I’m haunted by one of them:

“When shall the eye see once more that spring of spotless green? / How many monsoon are required / To wash away the stains of blood?”

I walk in the dark to the venue where the function’s about to begin; there is a crowd gathered, of admirers and well-wishers, and it’s hard to find a seat. There’s an interview, to be followed by a reading. One of the most interesting questions in the long conversation Mimi has with budding poet Maitreyabandhu at the start of the session is about form. Is it her Iranian roots that have led her back to the ghazal, readers often ask her. In fact, it isn’t a going back at all: after her long experiments with Western forms, and with the Malay pantun, she came to the ghazal as a new challenge (not surprisingly, she’s best known as a formalist). She couldn’t read Persian and had to make translations or oral renditions suffice as she studied the genre. She didn’t have any one model as Hafez and Rumi come to her in borrowed forms. So her ghazals, in my opinion, are actually reinventions rather than appropriations, leading her to push the English language of which she has a virtuoso mastery into directions that spiral into something that seems to transcend language. In her new book, she’s pioneered a new form, poems composed of eight verses all in (usually unrhymed) couplets. (It’s a manner not dissimilar to Kizer’s renditions of ghazals, in which she made no attempt to replicate rhyme schemes, opting instead for a closeness to meaning and a transnational poetic sensibility.)

One of Mimi’s unique talents is her ability to read her own work out to audiences and use the rich range of her voice to extract every subtle shade from her poems. I would contend that her dramatic and musical training have made Mimi’s hearing ultra-acute; she has learned to recognise hidden echoes and nuances of sound, a skill that gives her work its exceptional musicality. In 2000, I believe, Mimi and I made an unusual experiment: I translated a Faiz poem literally, then twice read out and also sang the original Urdu to her so she could hear its cadences. She then crafted a new poem which remains strangely closer to the spirit of the original than would a straight translation:

“Weaving through our towns, centuries / of raw silk, brocade and velvet / have swilled the streets in blood. / Bodies, ripe with sores in lanes and markets, / are paying with their lives. But I / had little time for the world’s wars, / love was war enough. In your sky, / your eyes, were all my falling stars.” (Extract.)

Inevitably, the question of form seems to lead the question of roots and origins. Mimi was born in Iran, but was sent away to school in England aged six; she didn’t go back to Tehran until she was 17 and had entirely forgotten her first language. She points out that whereas many expatriates and migrants have a strong connection with their families, her upbringing was devoid of any such links, which makes me think that her powers of observation are all the stronger for this lack of specific location. Iran, Spain, Morocco, England are all seen and imaged with a clarity and lucidity that are rare in those who have one set of roots and often look around themselves with blurred vision, ignoring the joy in small things that Mimi, quoting Wordsworth’s phrase “splendour in the grass,” has made her poetic mission.

Odd, though, that beautiful evocations of place often make readers insist that these must derive from nostalgia. I often ask myself, for example, whether the Karachi sea I miss in London’s autumn is the sea of my childhood or the one I last saw nearly two years ago on a winter’s night.

Mimi’s interlocutor calls hers an “existential homesickness,” but she quickly responds by saying that hers is a forward, rather than a backward, gaze: a recognition that the longing for that otherwhere is not a sign of loss but of longing. To illustrate my point, a place once seen can create an image in the mind that then overlaps with another and creates an ideal image of the place we long for. I’ve been entranced in Java, Dorset, Lombardy and Andalusia in the way Mimi has in Iowa, Lisbon or Cornwall. Can we call this enchantment with places we’ve passed through loss, or is it a signal of what awaits, is yet to come? And I have my answer. The sea is tomorrow’s promise.

As I go homeward, I think that home is ultimately in the beholder’s eyes. I reflect on how this feeling is something I share with Mimi, and with a very few other writers I love. I try to recall Isak Dinesen’s words: “…God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.”