Enchanting verses that capture the essence of Irish life and nature.Frank Ormsby's The Rain Barrel invites readers to see the world with fresh eyes, finding beauty in the mundane and wonder in the everyday. A local fire-god with a tongue of flowers, Ormsby masterfully blends folklore with reflections on art and life. His poems explore themes of nature, memory, and loss, resonating with those who appreciate lyrical verse and the unsentimental elegy....

‘… 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 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...

Luminous and dark, Frank Ormsby's poetry explores memory, loss, and the complexities of Irish identity.In The Darkness of Snow, Ormsby reflects on his youth in Fermanagh and adult years in Belfast, commemorating a life lived in poetry. Memories of the Troubles and the city's restoration intertwine with meditations on Irish painters and a poignant series of Parkinson's Poems.This collection confronts historical atrocities in "The Willow Forest," tol...

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....

'The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall tothe Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge forcriminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution intextiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since1930, I have watched the mills o...

MACCAIG * MORGAN * LOCHHEADThis book contains a selection of the finest work from three of Scotland's best-known and best-loved poets: Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead. They have fascinated and charmed thousands of readers and listeners across Europe and America with the energy, humour and compassion of their vision.MacCaig's memorable celebrations of the physical world and the tragic-comic note of many of his short lyrics contrast strikingly with Morgan's poem...

Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, bot...

'An irresistibly coherent book which celebrates the rising and the raising of the human spirit.' Michael Hofmann, The Times'If any poetry written today can have this 'redemptive effect' - as Heaney in his critical writing has begun to claim it can - then this is it.' Mick Imlah, Independent on Sunday