‘… the universal poet, servant of the medium, renewer of the forms, discoverer of the nugget of harmony in the language of ourselves.' Seamus Heaney'He brings to Irish poetry an invaluable chronicle of mixed allegiances and lost worlds of the ambiguities of the colony and the defeats of victory. No one else has quite had his themes; no one else has quite ventured on his enquiries.' Eavan BolandEdited, with a new introduction, by acclaimed poets Michael Longley and Frank Orm...

Frank Ormsby's poetry is deep but never sententious, exhibits great technique but never flaunts it, is of the moment but never trendy. In his most recent volume, The Darkness of Snow, we see memories of his youth in Fermanagh as well as poems of adult years in Belfast, reflecting on the aftermath of the Troubles and the city's restoration while commemorating a life lived in poetry. This collection also includes a sequence that meditates on the art of Irish painters, followed by a ...

Frank Ormsby's new collection travels among places strange and familiar: from the shaping memories of an upbringing in rural County Fermanagh, to a Belfast reinventing itself in a new century and the exhilarating novelty of America. In the first part of Fireflies Ormsby explores the past and vibrant present of an area of New York State which he has visited for the past twelve years. It remains to him as elusive as the 'fugitive selves' of the fireflies of the title. The latter part of the ...

Frank Ormsby's keen eye is trained on numerous subjects: the unheralded country people in Northern Ireland, American soldiers stationed there during World War II, and the rich natural world of Westchester County north of Manhattan. However, these sympathetic poems are not untroubled observations. As Michael Longley notes in his introduction: "From early on something desolate and unsettling shades this poet's vision, counteracting his warmer compulsions." The Troubles of Northern Irish hist...

Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection of poems is, on the whole, a playful book which constantly surprises us with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether as in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Then spirit of place is richly imagined, whether in the form of ‘Juggy’, the ‘simpleton’ sleepwalking through the estate, or the humanised tumbling paddy, both clumsy celebrant and instrument of refinement among th...

Frank Ormsby's seventh collection of poems reflects not only the beauty of the Irish landscape and the sensuous and aesthetic impact of the small farms among which he grew up, but also the continuing violence of the 'Troubles'. Close to the surface of mountain and bogland lie the hidden graves of the 'Disappeared'. Ormsby continues to make vivid use of the short, resonant poems which were a striking feature of Goat's Milk and The Darkness of Snow. Here too the content is ...

The Darkness of Snow is Frank Ormsby's most varied and versatile collection to date. It includes three substantial sets of poems whose themes are refreshingly and sometimes painfully new. One is a suite of poems – sombre, good-humoured, flippant – about the early stages of Parkinson's Disease. Ormsby was diagnosed as having the disease in 2011. Another was prompted by the work of Irish painters in Normandy, Brittany and Belgium at the end of the 19th century. There are also further explora...

Introduced by Michael Longley, Goat's Milk is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Frank Ormsby, a central figure in the poetry of Northern Ireland for the past forty years. As well as a whole collection of new poems, it includes work from his four previous collections: A Store of Candles (1977), A Northern Spring (1986), The Ghost Train (1995) and Fireflies (2009). In his most recent poems Ormsby brings a new directness and simplicity to bear on the rural Fermanagh of his boyhood....