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Oskar Prozesky
(Wordsmith / Roger Worrell / Woordeboer)
Oskar Prozesky
is a South African of German-English parentage. Born in
Pietermarizburg, Natal in 1947, he retains an emotional link
with the KwaZulu-Natal landscape and with the Zulu people,
among whom his great-grandfather worked as a Berlin
missionary in the nineteenth century. He received his
schooling in entirely different surroundings, however – in
Oudtshoorn in the southern Cape Province and in
Graaff-Reinet in the Cape Midlands. Here he learnt Afrikaans
and came to love the stark, wide landscape of the arid Karoo.
Schooled in
poetry by the English of the King James Bible and the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer, by the strongly alliterative
lyric poetry of Germany, and by the grainy simplicity of
Afrikaans, he has become a poet with a distinctive voice.
His subject matter is wide: from love poetry of
extraordinary intensity and tenderness to mystic landscape
verse (mainly in Afrikaans), to trenchant metaphysical
questioning of the world, to childlike but bold confessional
verse. As a poet he occasionally uses the pseudonyms
Wordsmith (English) and Woordeboer (Afrikaans).
Prozesky is also
a prose writer and illustrator. He designs the covers of all
his own books, and has illustrated two of his children’s
books. African Farm, his satirical book on Zimbabwe, was
written under the pseudonym Roger Worrell.
His deepest
commitment is to the pursuit of religious truth, the quest
for God. It is his belief that, as Love, God is the centre
of the world, Love being defined as compassion, generosity,
justice, honesty, humility, gratitude and reverence for
life. Every human being is, he believes, also the centre of
the world – in a double sense: both as a free agent for
Love, and as the object of the loving concern and compassion
of others. The sunburst logo which he designed and uses
represents this Centrism, this mystic union of heart and
mind.
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