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Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan to an English mother and a Pakistani father. She grew up in Hertfordshire. Her first collection, The Country at My Shoulder (Oxford University Press, 1993), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and the Whitbread poetry prizes. Europa (Bloodaxe, 2008) and At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe, 2013) were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent collection is Fairoz (Bloodaxe, 2022). Moniza received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002, and she is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Introduction
When I think of loving poetry and the early times of that for me, I often go back to my schooldays, particularly to secondary school when I was 13 or 14 years old. Creativity was prized in our English lessons and we used to write our own poems in exercise books we called our ‘anthologies’. We read many poems, selected by our English teacher, who had wide enthusiasms. The poems were often handwritten and reproduced on the Banda copying machine, a spirit duplicator of the 1960s and they smelled strongly of white spirit, a smell I came to associate with the poetry. I recall Hopkins’ ‘The Windhover’, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’ and ‘Mountain Lion’, Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer Before Birth’, Ted Hughes’ ‘The Horses’. We read some Chinese poems in translation, and their surface simplicity made me feel that I might be able to write too and that a poem could be conversational and limpid. When I was 16 I studied a selection of Edward Thomas’s poems, thought them marvellous, and his was the first poetry collection I purchased. The poems I read in these early years enlarged me, they were of this world and another world, and they were adventures in language. When I came to write poetry as an adult in the late 1980s there were pioneering women poets leading the way such as Vicki Feaver and Penelope Shuttle. They were a fresh inspiration. I felt encouraged to write about the Pakistani side of my background through reading poems by, for instance, Mimi Khalvati and Sujata Bhatt. These writers made me feel that perhaps I had something to explore and contribute, inspired by my own heritage.
Music, imagination and clarity – these are important to me as both reader and writer of poems. With clarity, I feel it’s rather like looking into a pool. If the water is clear I can glimpse its depths. If it’s murky I can’t see much beyond the surface. In my writing I am drawn to lightness in a Calvino-esque sense: “the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living”. I enjoy experimenting, and in my third collection, Carrying My Wife (Bloodaxe, 2000), I played the role of husband to an imaginary wife. In the ‘Souls’ sequence, (Souls, Bloodaxe, 2002), I explored the idea of the soul as our ultimate fantasy and invented ‘the souls’ as characters. Myth has been important to my work and in my collection Europa, a version of ‘Europa and the Bull’ formed the centrepiece, I tried to portray Europa as a girl undergoing trauma. In my most recent collection, Fairoz, I explore an imagined teenage girl’s susceptibility to extremism. I have been drawn to poetry in translation, both as reader and writer. My versions of the French-Uruguayan poet Jules Supervielle, Homesick for the Earth, were published by Bloodaxe in 2011. I also, with a Russian friend Veronika Krasnova, produced a pamphlet of versions of Marina Tsvetaeva’s later poems: Bitter Berries (New Walk Editions, 2018).
I am very grateful to The High Window for giving me the opportunity to present a group of fairly recent poems from a collection-in-the-making. Initially the poems were inspired by my mother, her mixed marriage, unusual for that time, and the period she spent in Pakistan. These poems form a thread through the whole. Also included, are poems on ageing, for instance, my mother’s and my own, along with a sense of all that we live through, and the passage of time. I have been aiming at stand-alone poems, a departure from the long sequences I have often written, but the hope is that the poems will speak to each other. The two longer poems featured here, ‘In the Small Hours’ and ‘Leaving the Womb-House’, plus ‘My Mother’s Indian Bangles’, are published for the first time. ‘The Weighing’ initially appeared in the anthology After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in Celebration of Sylvia Plath edited by Sarah Corbett and Ian Humphreys (Nine Arches Press, 2022). The poem ‘The Handwriting of the Very Old’ first appeared in The Poetry Review.
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Moniza Alvi: Five Poems
IN THE SMALL HOURS
The doorbell was ringing and ringing at two in the morning.
The door chain too thick with paint to operate.
A police officer called through the letter box to the two of us.
A car crashed into the house opposite, she said
and a pipe has been hit.
The oldest house in the town.
A smell of gas enveloped the road.
(Gas, I found out, doesn’t have an odour.
It’s added to it, the rotten-egg smell.)
The road was strewn with car.
The houses between the tapes have to be evacuated, she said.
The White Hart pub has opened so everyone has a warm place to go.
The White Hart up the road. The white hart in the middle of the forest.
I hardly took anything – a small shoulder-bag, my glasses.
Half-asleep, I forgot my phone. I took myself
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxand that was too much.
The stars were very widely spaced – each one
with its own darkness around it.
The driver was hurt. Inebriated, the officer said.
Like the Good Shepherd she accompanied us as far as the pub.
*
Not many in the White Hart – some had gone elsewhere.
The pub with its ash-grey walls.
We lay down, the two of us, on a narrow banquette –
together in a boat on a leaden sea.
Normally, I don’t feel any particular age.
Sometimes I feel young
the youngest person in the room.
But for the first time
I felt, not older, but old.
The years, all of them, stuck to me.
I couldn’t shake them off.
I don’t know how to say it –
it was a stony sensation.
I was withered.
My mossy green coat.
*
Who is hunting the white hart,
the hart of wisdom and sacred knowledge?
It scents the air and is afraid.
*
3.30 a.m. and we were allowed to return –
those of us who lived on our side of the road.
We entered our home as warily as burglars.
Drank hot tea. Watched a video clip
sent by our daughter in New Zealand
of dolphins leaping in the sea.
Then we slept in the arms of the house.
*
The next day – a feeling, I supposed, of shock.
The house opposite, with all its windows
thrown open to the winter. The damage
more severe than I thought.
A second house had been hit, and a third.
Rubble, splintered door-surrounds.
Trauma, said the gash in the wall.
Trauma added to trauma.
And some of my agedness returned.
*
For the two of us, it was nothing really.
Nothing and something.
Just a fraction, a splinter of something.
*
What we live through, lived
and have lived through.
First-hand. Second-hand.
Passing through many hands.
Coursing
xxxx xxxxthrough our veins and arteries.
What makes us old.
What makes us young.
***
LEAVING THE WOMB HOUSE
The sky is so unbounded.
Even the garden is a problem.
The womb-house commands
Stay inside. It’s better this way.
It’s what a house is for.
Look at the world through the window.
That will surely be enough.
The house with its motherly intuition.
*
You step outside
to walk down the street.
Who can stay indoors forever?
Your life is shrinking.
xxBreathe in, breathe out
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxslowly.
Try fastening your eyes
on the shoes
of the person in front.
A triumph!
Steadily
you make it from A to B.
How can this familiar little town
produce such a feeling of dread?
You tell yourself it’s not
the town that’s producing it.
*
Tracing it back back
and to the side
widening the angle
the going wrong
the what went wrong
from the first
from before the first
Enough.
You think you’ve said
enough.
*
The sheep are in the meadow
under the storm-cracked tree.
They’ve composed themselves
beneath the arch
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxof a fallen branch.
Two are turned inwards
and one looks towards you.
The birds have the whole sky
to themselves.
*
You’re out in the world
and moving more freely.
Time loops back.
Still you ask yourself
how much of the world can you take
how many miles of it?
*
You walk on the bridge.
The river is wide.
You’re walking over nothing.
Think forwards.
*
Now you’re stepping out
opening up
the space of the page.
The page that is never entirely blank.
Take another step.
Do what you can here.
Go as far as you can.
A kind of delight.
This is the way of the page.
***
THE WEIGHING
She tells me how, when I wasn’t feeding well
she’d take me down the lane to her neighbour
the other English woman, an inspector of schools.
My mother would stand on this lady’s scales
with – and then without me.
So that was how I was weighed
at that difficult time in Pakistan.
1954. The sky was burning blue.
It was later, a few years later, that I started
as they say, to thrive.
Am I thriving now? I ask myself.
What do I weigh in my flesh and bones –
in the secret inside the scales?
The difference then between my mother
with and without me – was it infinitesimal?
Now she glances at me as if in wonderment
as I sit in the armchair opposite
and Norfolk light floods the care home windows.
By a sleight of hand her story
becomes my own.
I pass it on here – a little of it.
***
MY MOTHER’S INDIAN BANGLES
A set of suns encircling her wrist –
so strongly a part of her, I hardly
o
think of them as her jewellery.
Her hands are thinner now, more
o
ghostlike – I’m startled to think
the bangles will outlast her.
o
To me they signify the elsewhere
she embraced, or part-embraced.
o
In this, I was always her apprentice.
What will fill the empty circles?
o
Will I wear the bangles one day
and will they be more hers, or mine?
o
Still they shine, a very yellow
Indian gold on her mottled wrist.
***
THE HANDWRITING OF THE VERY OLD
My mother’s faint and hesitant words
are like bird prints in the snow
only just reaching their destination.
Her hand shakes slightly, she’s breathless.
The ruled lines on the notepad help her.
Is my own handwriting smaller now?
My stronger lenses magnify it.
All this printing in the snow – I ask
the wind to carry me across the distance.
The High Window 