Verdict: pomegranate
This review of Helen Moffett’s Strange Fruit is definitely a carrot but the reviewer’s nostalgia for the strange fruit on the book’s cover means it’s a also a “pomegranate”.
I remember the first time I saw a pomegranate – it fell from our neighbour’s tree, and cracked open on the hard pavement below, a few feet from where I was standing with friends. Curious, we all stepped a bit closer to this strange fruit. Someone gingerly kicked it, and as it rolled away, a handful of pomegranate seeds escaped in a sudden burst of colour. I’d never before seen such a beautiful, delicious-looking burgundy pink, and a sudden hunger gripped me, but as none of us quite knew what to do with it, or whether it was edible, we all left it until consultation with my mom, older and wiser, revealed that it was definitely something we could eat. Since then, I’ve always associated it with flavour, irony, uncertainty, beauty, exoticness, and strangeness. Perhaps it’s apt, then, that this fruit finds itself similarly cracked open on the front page of Helen Moffett’s altogether edible debut collection, Strange Fruit, which contains a range of tones and themes.
Book Details
Scribd.com book preview:
Please register or log in to comment
» View comments as a forum thread and add tags in BOOK Chat
January 28th, 2010 @10:00 #
What a lovely, thoughtful and well-deserved carrot. Irony, flavour, beauty, strangeness - Grace Kim really gets to grips with the collection.
January 28th, 2010 @10:15 #
Wow, great review, Helen, and well-deserved, judging by some of the cited verses. Congratulations!
January 28th, 2010 @10:54 #
Congratulations, Helen, on a favourable review for your debut anthology.
January 28th, 2010 @12:29 #
Thank you, kind ones. Richard, do you not have your own copy of SF? Ve haf vays und means of getting one to you. I really liked this review, even if it did make me feel a little undressed. I loved Kim's pomegranate anecdote, and the way she got how that image worked at many levels. Yes and no about the shy bit; I did write two poems about penises and one called "After sex". And had to go through the collection with my parents, marking which poems they were NOT allowed to read. Which makes the point, I suppose.
January 28th, 2010 @13:22 #
I like the verdict here, pomegranate! Should be a new category.
January 29th, 2010 @08:53 #
She's really engaged with your work - well deserved carrot, friendHelen.
January 29th, 2010 @10:02 #
That carrot is julienned, lightly stir-fried with garlic and ginger honey glazed.
January 29th, 2010 @12:35 #
I vould luf my ferry own cobby! But please give it the parental guidance mark-up. You know how impressionable I am.
January 29th, 2010 @20:12 #
Send me or Colleen a postal address off-list, and then settle down to watch your mailbox. It may take a while. But parental guidance? Nooit!
January 29th, 2010 @21:34 #
A wonderful review Helen and wonderful poems too
January 30th, 2010 @12:29 #
Shukriya, Amitabh.
January 30th, 2010 @13:50 #
Meherbani Helen