The Weather Wheel

by Mimi Khalvati

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 80
Rating:

Synopsis:

In these new poems, each of them written in couplets and contained within the space of 16 lines, 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. An extended elegy for her mother, the book is also a series of meditations on the small details of animals' lives and on the vulnerable animal within the human being.

I didn’t enjoy The Weather Wheel as much as I enjoyed the other collection I’ve read by Mimi Khalvati, though there were a few images and poems that struck me and will probably stick with me, mostly surrounding her grief for her mother, like this couplet:

I measured distances by her. My mother my compass,
my almanac and sundial, drawing me arcs in space.

Overall, not a favourite collection, but all the same, my feeling when I finished it was fairly positive, if that makes sense! Something I’m glad to have read, more for the overall impression than for individual poems.

I liked the Afterwardness collection quite a bit more, though.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)