Frank Ormsby in conversation with Anne Morrison for the Irish Cultural Centre, 2 May 2021 - now on YouTube. His second Ireland Professor of Poetry Lecture online 4...
Today there has been information and it is time again
to ransack the mountain. His mother has hired a psychic
and the slow searcher’s walk continues into its tenth year.
The mother, as always, carries the photograph of her son
in the tilted boater. He might be about to tip the hat
and bid us good morrow. Or has he been snapped
in the chorus line of, say, a musical?
Despite his showbiz air, he is not smiling.
Even without hindsight, we would register his anxiety.
Nine years have passed and today there has been
information. The search parties re-form.
Hope trickles again like a mountain stream
they must follow to its source. They search every dip
in the heather, consult their notes
about flooded hollows and rocks and nameless bushes,
the hundred anonymous landmarks in a bland landscape
that has changed with the seasons.
It has been nine years and the voice on the telephone
was uncertain and the police are again pressing for information.
*
Winter Landscape with Searchers
I search for a field of unmarked graves
at the foot of a mountain. The winter leaves
and the random wind let nothing pass,
are taking a seminar on loss.
The wind is first to forget the dead,
the graves, wind-scoured, quick to fade
into bogs and beaches, bones interred
in the mountain beds of the disappeared.
The land is a patchwork of the deceased,
anonymous corners gone to seed,
from the decor of the family plot
to the famine grave and the cholera pit.
I fall in step as the searchers press
home in the dusk without success.
Winter rains begin to drown
remote, unconsecrated ground.
*
He Was the Eighth to Go Missing
He was the eighth to go missing.
They find his body under fresh spring grass
and last season’s rubble.
Hoisted with a kind of reverence,
he is slow-shouldered at last
along the main street of his home village.
The mourners have taken charge. They will go on
waiting because waiting
became the direction of their days.
They wait as though something singular
might yet be done with the ten lost years.
Their silence extends a passionate vigil,
a vast fidelity that may
last the rest of their lives.
The cortege halts at the graveside. The adults bow.
Schoolchildren duck forward to lay wreaths
of mountain heather on the wet clay.
*
from The Rain Barrel
1 Prologue
It was so much a family emblem,
like the axe-head found in the dunghill,
or the scarecrow set at the highest
point on the farm, playfully attired
in Grandad Joe’s old clothing. You could imagine
the rain-barrel soaked in experience, shaped elsewhere,
in another country, perhaps. Did it ring sturdily
in the making? Did it have time
to grieve for the forest? I picture it left out in the rain,
a short apprenticeship, now snatch it
from memory, restore it to its place
between the four square-eyed front windows.
Rain comes shimmering in over the hills.
At home in a rain-weighty climate,
the barrel stands ready for its first shower.
Contents List
13 Untroubled
14 The Black Kettle
15 The Bee-keeper
16 Fuchsia
17 The Wild Dog Rose
18 Foxgloves
19 The Butterfly House
20 Roman Laurel
21 Cows:
21 1 ‘Their eyes are innocence…’
21 2 ‘The utter ignominy…’
22 3 ‘We never got used…’
23 At the Elvis Convention
24 The Sound of Trains
25 Seaside
26 The Disappeared
27 Today There Has Been Information
28 Dawn Chorus, with Painting by Joan Miró
30 Towards an Elegy
32 Small Things
33 Small World (4):
33 ‘I set my cap…’
33 ‘In your hair, scents of autumn…’
33 ‘Belfast Lough…’
33 ‘Summer surrenders…’
33 ‘Old friends at the tavern…’
33 ‘Fooled into flower…’
34 ‘A hermit bird, the corncrake…’
34 ‘The heron fluffs…’
34 ‘Wind across bogland…’
34 ‘Ochone! Ochone!…’
35 From A Belfast Journal
37 Saying Goodbye to the Family
38 White-throated sparrows
39 Love Poem
40 Convalescence
41 The Book-mark
42 Second-hand
42 1 The Second-hand Bookshop
42 2 The Second-hand Book
43 Nits
44 Preliminaries
45 Evening on the Farm: Early Winter
46 Poem Beginning and Ending with a Drunken Poet
47 The Poets
48 The Launch
49 With Seamus Heaney in Mind:
49 1 The Poet’s Death
49 2 At the Graveside
49 3 Visiting the Grave
50 Starlings:
50 1 A Big Hand
50 2 Every Curve
50 3 Élite
51 4 Starlings at play
52 The Kingfisher
53 Autumnal
54 The Last Leaf in the Garden
55 Fums and Porringers
56 The Urban Fox
57 Scarecrow
58 The Suitcase
59 At a Railway Station, Calcutta
60 Winter Landscape with Searchers
61 He Was the Eighth to Go Missing
62 Billy Robinson’s Kawasaki
63 Abandoned Gardens
64 Some Farmyard Buckets
65 The Hatchet
66 Custodians
67 There Will Be a Knock
68 Wake in Progress
69 Sleeping and Forgetting
70 The Bomb
71 The Security Man
72 Chagall’s Goats
73 Aristotle Reaches Fermanagh
74 Rosary
75 Rains
76 Pulse
77 The Rain Barrel:
77 1 Prologue
77 2 We Acquire the Rain Barrel
78 3 Notes Towards a Portrait of the Rain Barrel
78 4 A Busy Life
79 5 The Rain Barrel in the Snow
79 6 In the Family
79 7 Two Old Warriors
80 8 Still Life
80 9 Lost Lives
81 10 Romance
81 11 Interlude, with Girls
82 12 The Rain Barrel and the Full Moon
82 13 Photograph, with Rain Barrel
83 14 The Rain Barrel and the Sparrows
83 15 Another Use for a Rain Barrel
84 16 Lightning and the Rain Barrel
84 17 Some Other Duties for a Rain Barrel
85 18 The Butt
86 When She Died, Thinking of Him
87 No Closure
88 Rain Flowers
89 Grace Before Meals
90 The Dogs
91 Beyond the Walls:
91 1 By the River
91 2 Miss Brightly
91 3 The Peacock
91 4 Souvenir
92 The Grey Squirrel
92 Sharing Beds
93 The Parents Wait
93 Parents
94 Lessons
95 Visitors, 4 a.m.
96 The Roundabout
97 All He Remembered
98 Our Woods Were Friendly
99 The Two Trees
100 Thaw
101 Running Water
102 After Fernando Pessoa
103 Notes
Related Reviews
From the reviews of Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk and The Darkness of Snow:
'Frank Ormsby belongs to that extraordinary generation of Northern Irish poets which includes Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin. He is a poet of the truest measure… From his earliest work Ormsby has favoured a natural shapeliness… A plain-speaking, down-to-earth utterance may be the norm, but it teeters on the verge of taking flight, and sometimes gives way to an exquisitely refined lyricism.’ – Michael Longley
‘Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems, by Frank Ormsby, reminds us why we missed this poet’s wry and concise voice during the 14-year gap in his writing life; and the new poems extend and ratify his unique angle of vision.’ – Patricia Craig, Irish Times (Books of the Year 2015)
‘Continuing an impressively strong start to the year for Irish poetry… Frank Ormsby’s latest is both a retrospective as well as a vehicle for new work. It evokes both his family life and Fermanagh’s rural past in a poetic form which, as Michael Longley puts it, “teeters on the verge of taking flight”.’ – Michael Conaghan, Belfast Telegraph, on Goat's Milk
‘Ormsby has found his place and time in The Darkness of Snow. Ecological and political, personal and historical, these are songs of reconciliation by a poet who was always, in fact, a generous maker of his own peace processes, and exceptionally wise in the art of being human.’ – Carol Rumens, PN Review
‘Frank Ormsby has had a long and illustrious career in northern Irish letters… With the publication of his latest '70th birthday' collection, The Darkness of Snow, it’s easy to see why: here is a book teeming with wisdom and good humour, a book that combines formal dexterity with verve and wit… the fourth [section], The Parkinson’s Poems, is notable for its profound and often funny meditations on the nature of the condition, following Ormsby’s recent diagnosis. Yet it’s the closing narrative poem, The Willow Forest, which might be the book’s masterstroke. Taking as its subject the aftermath of an unspecified war, it presents us with a cast of depersonalised characters… and leads us in an entirely unexpected direction, reminiscent of the work of Zbigniew Herbert.’ - Tara McEvoy, The Irish News
‘“Fervour” seems an apt description for what Ormsby has been undertaking in his lifelong commitment to poetry. He has written – quietly, diligently and effectively – for more than 40 years now. His first full collection, A Store of Candles, was published in 1977 and The Darkness of Snow marks the latest chapter in that “mad desire” to pursue perfect poems.’ - Pól Ó Muirí, The Irish Times
