In his contest award statement, Vern Rutsala said.“The language is spare and under control and has a genuine immediacy. It follows the experiences of a young South African recruit in World War II from enlistment through combat and to demob. There are evocative lines such as these from “7 October, 1944, Italy”: “A crystal voice…sings O Sole Mio/ out there somewhere in the dark…” and on the effects of war: “[A man] swings his half leg/back and forth, a pendulum…” The South African poems follow the speaker into adulthood with a number that center on the Sharpville massacre which are given solidity by pointing up one victim he knew and by citing whites and their fears after the massacre while other poems emphasize the brutal exploitation of the blacks. The poems never preach but are lined out with a cool and therefore devastating effect.”
Born in South Africa, served in WW2 as a medic and then migrated to the US in the 60's He was a physician.
The war poems were the result of his revisiting the journal he kept during the war which he hadnt read for 60 years. The winner of poetry prizes in New England.
IN A STONE S HOLLOW is strong as poetry but also for its political and historical significance: the experiences of a young South African recruit in World War II, and then, in the second part, the poems shift to South Africa and focus on a child s dawning awareness of racism and apartheid. The language is spare and under control and has genuine immediacy. The poems never preach but are lined out with a cool and therefore devastating effect.
Freddy Frankel was born in the Transvaal (now Gauteng), South Africa, and migrated to the US in 1962. Since his retirement from academic psychiatry in 1997, he has been honing his skills at writing poetry. His work has appeared in several poetry magazines and three anthologies. His chapbook, Hottentot Venus: Poems of Apartheid, was published in 2003 by Pudding House Publications. He won the New England Writers Robert Penn Warren First Award in 2003. His book, In a Stone’s Hollow, was first finalist in the Rhea and Seymour Gorsline 2005 Poetry Contest, and published by Fairweather Books, an imprint of Bedbug Press, earlier this year.
