Permission To Breathe: The Very Selected Mimi Khalvati, Michael Laskey & Michael Schmidt

Smith/doorstop's handsomely-produced Very Selected collection, available in individual or three-poet pamphlet formats, makes a novel and stimulating introduction to some of the best of current poetry.

With alluringly simple cover designs, each suggestive of an over-arching theme or direction, the selections themselves are acutely rendered, giving insightful synoptic distillations of thought-process and poetic journeying.

If it is difficult to identify unifying features - Mimi Khalvati, Michael Laskey and Michael Schmidt are very different poets - then maybe that is the point: this 'MRI scan' of angles, ingresses, symbols of stylistic and tonal disparity, yields a detailed overview of the poetical body politic.

Finding the transcendent, the purposive, and an implication of foreboding in the ordinary, are Michael Laskey's stock-in-trade. A closely-observed 'Cucumber', the details of a raspberry-picking trip with his ill mother, a late night solitary walk, may induce unspecified contentment, fear, or elegiac longing.

Or sometimes only the describing of domestic comedy, and love, through the smallest insignificance. 'The Clothes-peg' ignites laughter and a sense of bonding through the implement's workaday uses and calculated misuses; whilst the unsung dignity of a life in 'Page-turner' is celebrated entirely for its own sake.

Laskey's conflation of the generations - of son, father, grandfather - draws family into a charged circle of remembrance not unlike that invoked by Tony Harrison in his poem 'Illuminations'. The culminating expression, 'Delicious raspberries xxx', in 'Picking Raspberries with my Mother' is a hymn to poignant memory which bears the double-edged resonance of Harrison's ironic 'Wish you were here!'.

The bitterness of the latter's poem 'National Trust' emerges anew in Laskey's frightening 'Ladder', which reverses ascent into descent, and envisages a climb down into darkness in foreshortened sardonic lines as regular as equispaced rungs, and as suggestive a metaphor for fear as the facing of unpalatable truth:

'Why would you think
you'd be exempt ?
Lower yourself
into the shaft -
the rungs ought
to take your weight.'

All considerations seemingly conjoin in the wonderful 'Home Movies' which ingeniously reverses a film spool and unravels images of a parental wedding day. There is uncertainty here, a splicing of reality, ghosts, déjà-vu, and faux-recognitions; an unwinding of lives to the point of historical re-negotiation, a space where filmic eye twinkles become suggestions of pre-conception, and the removal of a ring from a finger a metaphor for death.

The ghostly figure imagined in the street in 'Weighing the Present', which concludes this fine cross-section of Laskey's work, is alive 'for an instant', his presence as flimsy as 'that slither of negatives at his feet' in 'Home Movies'.

If Laskey's firm grip of observed detail is an ironic attempt to corner the impermanent and the illusory, Mimi Khalvati's modus is a celebration of sensory perception in an approximal language. Unrestrained by a natural proclivity for form, Khalvati conjures delicate images out of a stringent impressionism. Meaning is sometimes derived from intuition; she conveys fragility as persuasively as Pope, and better than many of her contemporaries.

The beautiful 'Sonnet for my Daughter' concludes with a quiet delicacy of similes co-mingled with an effulgence of love:

'Like a rose she slept in the morning sun.
Each vein a small blue river, each eyelash shone.'

The sublimely-drawn 'Rubaiyat', in characteristic quatrains, is wrought on a similar plain: a narcotic drowse through a hot Persian afternoon embodies a deeply moving elegy through the unlikely agency of observed ephemera: the nail file still in its sheath, her 'slippers lying neatly by the door' are silent emblems of a life, as fixed to its purpose as an anchor. The narrator's intrinsic connection to this same soil are described in arboreal metaphors:

'I don't mind that the lilac's roots aren't mine.
Its boughs are, and its blooms. It curves its spine
towards my soil and litters it with dying
stars: deadheads I gather up like jasmine.'

Similarly, the inference of mood through unusually perceptive images illuminates the poem 'Nostalgia' in the way of sentiment itself: 'the particular light behind rain' evokes, in the manner of Rilke, an inexpressible but totemic sense of recall.

Khalvati's capacity for dropping in and out of a formal engagement which unifies by crossing borders - Rubaiyat to Villanelle to Ghazal to regular quatrain - is almost a figure for the temporal, cultural and geographical shifts which characterise some of her best poems. 'The Chine' is one such.

Finding a useful metaphor for describing her own deracinated childhood in the fecundity of these ancient and mysterious ravines which carve deep furrows in the brow of the Isle of Wight's coastline, Khalvati's poem journeys into, over and beneath the chines in an, in places, fantastical rendering of nascence, love, and the kind of awe which is best transmitted through the the vision of an 'incomer'.

The melding of image with metaphor is near sublime here, capturing both the absolute newness of juvenile perception, and the seductively strange beauty of an island which is at once near and remote.

The poet's urge to personify landscape features is borne out of an instinctive maternal empathy: 'A chine / is a form of urgency to reach the sea. / As coastlines have eroded, chines, like orphans / stranded in a place without their slope / of history, have had to take a short cut'. And earlier, 'a gap, a yawn, / a chine that cleaves the mind in two, a line / on the land's belly.' A stretch mark, almost.

Elsewhere, 'Song' blends emotion, song and airborne weightlessness in a hymn to self-assertion; whilst the unusual Pantoum form, in 'On Lines from Paul Gauguin', is turned to an apostrophic and savagely ironic affirmation of the poetry of colour in Gauguin's Polynesian work, systematically undermined by his rapacious lust, syphilis and gradual blindness, which tarnished his sense of chromatic reality.

The meta-narrative of 'The Poet's House', a florid description about the art of florid description, is a poem about the surroundings in which poetry is made. The concluding 'Trees of Heaven' complete a circle made up of the imagination and the physical world, and figure for both muse and act of creation, with the bittersweetness of attendant vagaries: 'Right here on earth, / Trees of Heaven grow everywhere like weeds.'

Michael Schmidt's is a visionary poetics conducted with infinite forensic patience. The paradoxical fragility of the poem 'Wasps' Nest', built on a regular metrical foundation like the 'deep palaces and combs' of the nest itself, is a Trojan War of a poem, whose 'conquest' of 'fruit', drawn in delicate images, is pyrrhic.

The narrator's fore 'knowledge' and brazen transgression is figuratively, but deliberately, Adamic; the nest's final oozing of 'bitter honey' and the narrator's proffering of another, unstung, hand to repeat the exercise, is an indicator of an unwillingness to learn Eden's grander lesson.

The group of poems which make up the rump of this astute selection are directly biblical in derivation. Re-animating the stories of Noah, Cain and Abel, Sisera, Jacob and Jerome, Schmidt gives the characters three recognisable dimensions by investing arid narratives with motive (where none was previously vouchsafed), greed, complacency, vengefulness and incredulity.

In the manner of Tóibín's Testament of Mary, we eavesdrop on convincing dialogues of misunderstood signs, and of the freshness of human responses to strange events unfolding. In 'A Dream', Noah is certain of his god's efficacy, but not of His selection process. 'I don't believe', he says, 'this dream was meant for me.'

The pervasive, sombre note of much of the work here is stylised. Symbolisms resound like Modernist bells, and we hear Pound in the silence between lines. 'Until I Built the Wall' is pregnant with an allusive tone it does not otherwise promulgate, and amounts to a stark mea culpa about the drive to self-destruction.

With shades of Robert Frost, Schmidt bangs a drum of warning about 'enemies I do not know' who turn out to be chimeras, hovering 'ghost warriors'. The beautifully-wrought, metrically even triplets bear the gravitas of prophesy: we need not look far to find a modern equivalence on the US border with Mexico, the country, coincidentally, of Schmidt's birth.

At his best, the presence of a profound infusive love makes an irony of the lugubrious detachment and seriousness of Schmidt's tone. The affecting hymn to 'Agatha', a childhood friend and muse, allows his narrator to embark on a freewheeling, and very warm, Betjemanesque homage to the memory of a young girl whose eyes are now fed 'on the entire firmament':

'I look up at your swinging soles and still I love you.
I want to tie your right shoe lace and kiss your shin.'

And best of all, Schmidt strikes a note that would peal with Khalvati and Laskey. 'The Resurrection of the Body' enacts the returning to life of a fevered girl by a Jesus figure who is the physical embodiment of a divine impulse -'Flows that unusual grace which is rooted in muscle, / Which comes from the marrow and lymph, which is divine'.

Incredibly moving in its resolute metrical simplicity, we are given a window on something new at the time of healing, new and astonishing to those witnessing the 'Conjuror' at his vocation. Jesus' selfless messianic embrace - the faeces, stale sweat and 'pestilence' of the girl are dissolved in his figurative light - echoes the humility and love of St Julian for the sore-ridden and stinking leper in R. S. Thomas' profound poem.

The three poets represented in this diverting and poignant collection of pamphlets are a celebration of the minutely observed, the sensual, the elegiac and the numinous. A brave and ambitious combination, it is to be hoped that increasing popularity will reward the publisher's perspicacity in making them seem indivisible.

the Very Selected Mimi Khalvati, Michael Laskey & Michael Schmidt is published by smith/doorstop.
You can by a copy here: http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/shop/964/vs-collection-17