Limestone 84
(Ed. Daniel Massa, 1978, 98pp., featuring poems in English by John Cremona, Victor Fenech, Daniel Massa, Achille Mizzi, Kenneth Wain, Mario Azzopardi, with an Introduction by Peter Serracino-Inglott, cover by Alfred Chircop)
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| VF is the most direct reporter of the Malta scene… He shows without any beating about the bush the mark of Cain upon the Maltese brow: the paradoxical sign expressing at once the sense of condemnation to a tragic isolation (“I walk this quicksand city, chasing love bubbles”) and of promise (“and stepping stones of hope”) that the alienated still belong to a species destined for survival (“he’ll mend the nets, repaint the dgħajsa”), the dialectical emblem of a hopeful search for a happy (i.e. non-suicidal) exit from a labyrinth pursued under the incessant threat of an infinite regress (such as haunted J.L.Borges). His idiom is consistent with the clear picturing of the situation; it is that of heightened journalism. |
Peter Serracino-Inglott
Extract from book’s Introduction
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| VF is on the contrary an open and eloquent commentator, above all, of his own descent into disillusionment, all the more keenly experienced by a personality who once must have treasured dreams and great hopes… His disillusionment enriches his verse with the fine edge of irony… VF renders an immense service to future researchers of our social history; he accurately mirrors in himself the progressive collapse of the idealism sustained by the intellectuals of the post-war generation and their gradual decline into a state of gagged, middle-age moroseness, a feeling thinly overlaying a stratum of resentment. |
Dominic Cutajar
“Verse from Six Maltese Poets”
Times of Malta, 19.6.1978
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| VF’s poems are of uneven quality. His prose poems, “Homage to Kafka”, are among the most interesting and successful, for here there is none of the self consciousness that tends to mar his work. [It] is a gripping, dramatic monologue, the heartfelt cry of a single man who, like Kafka’s K, is hounded to perdition by a mysterious bureaucracy, and asks simply to be left alone. A clever twist at the end promises some hope where all that went before spelled despair. Of the verse proper, “Malta” is the most assured. Its rhythm and strong phrasing carry the reader relentlessly onwards, and then comes another unexpected ending – “little Malta, gently rocking”. |
Paul Xuereb
“Mystic Pillars and Mimic Men”
The Sunday Times of Malta, 11.6.1978
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