The image on the cover of Prunings, Helen Moffett’s second collection of poetry, is an exquisite unfinished painting of a broom karee branch. The poems in the slim chapbook are similarly delicate and unusually fragmented. Together with her editor and founder of uHlanga Press, Nick Mulgrew, Moffett decided to display the editorial process of pruning the individual pieces, but also entire poems which were cut from the volume and yet are still included in square brackets with horizontal lines struck through them. It is work in progress on show. The final effect of this innovative collaboration is one of wonder. What is supposedly excluded is as powerful as what remains: [no. It’s a failure. / I keep on in the hope that one day / I’ll figure out how to write this.]

In an interview, Moffett revealed that unlike in many other poems, the “I” in this intimate collection is not an assumed persona, but the author herself. There are three clearly identifiable clusters of poems in Prunings, sometimes overlapping in theme: musings on travels, often to exotic or dream-like locations; poems of loss and longing; and those which centre on memory and witnessing. In Barbados, Moffett records: “Drinking coconut water in / a rum-shop in the north, / talking cricket, liming. / This happened. We were there.” Closer to home, we witness in Kleinmond in Summer “Wind gone to bed, / water streaked with snail-trails. / Fading mountains exhale, / letting go the heat of day.”

The format of Ex-lover is more telling than the couplet which makes up the poem: “It’s about time I wrote you a poem; / everyone else has one.” The touching Wisdom is dedicated to one of our greats, Antjie Krog, and opens with: “I’m inclined to trust her, / this woman with a child’s clear vision, / who points out the scabrous sores / on the Emperor’s bare bum, / and sees magic in unpropitious dust.” Moffett also has the gift of noticing both, the sores and the magic. Prunings is a fine embodiment of her poetic vision. It ends with my favourite line, echoing Antigone: “[hmm, no.]”

Review first published in the Cape Times, 10 February, 2017