The Rain Barrel

About the Book

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 often delivered and reinforced through rich, contrasting images within or between poems: the scarlet flowers growing in a black kettle, the fuchsia that is both 'redolent of old battles' or a 'peaceful tapestry in the annals of stone'. Among the personae of the collection is the obliging father who volunteers to be buried by his children up to the neck in sand within sight of but some distance from the 'cold shadow of the mountain'. The elegiac note that echoes through the poems rarely darkens the mood. Ormsby's wit and humour, his sly sense of the absurd and what might be called his affection for the living and the dead draw the reader into considering the conviction that it is sometimes 'possible to believe / that joy grows irresistibly at the roots of everything'.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :

Frank Ormsby was born in 1947, in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and was educated at Queen's University in Belfast. Until 2010 he was Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His latest collections are The Darkness of Snow (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award in the US, and The Rain Barrel (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). His retrospective Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), includes work from four previous collections, A Store of Candles (Oxford University Press, 1977), A Northern Spring (Secker & Warburg, 1986), The Ghost Train (Gallery Press, 1995) and Fireflies (Carcanet, 2009), together with new poems, and was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. He has edited a number of anthologies and other books, including Northern Windows: An Anthology of Ulster Autobiography (1987), Thine in Storm and Calm: An Amanda McKittrick Ros Reader (1988), The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (1991), and The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland (2001), all from Blackstaff Press, and The Blackbird's Nest (2006), an anthology of poems from Queen's University, Belfast. Frank Ormsby was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989, and has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. In 1992 he received the Cultural Traditions Award, given in memory of John Hewitt, and in 2002 the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the University of St Thomas at St Paul, Minnesota. Frank Ormsby was guest of honour at BBC Proms in the Park 2017 at Castle Coole in Northern Ireland; actor Adrian Dunbar read two poems from Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems accompanied by the Ulster Orchestra and harpist Richard Allen in a specially commissioned work by Graeme Stewart. In 2018 Frank Ormsby collaborated with singer/songwriter Anthony Toner on an album The Kiss of Light. The album features recordings of Frank reading eleven of his own poems, with each reading followed by a short instrumental composed by Anthony Toner in response to the poems. On 6 September 2019 Frank Ormsby was named the eighth Ireland Professor of Poetry. He will serve from 1 November 2019 until 31 October 2022.

Review :
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. 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. 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.