Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems

By Frank Ormsby

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. A series of vignettes evokes his formative years, both his experience of division and loss (the impact of his father's death is a constant theme in his work), but also the enriching aspects of family and community and of the natural world. These poems deepen and extend themes central to the earlier work. They also reflect what The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature describes as Ormsby's gift for a 'poetry of resonant minutiae' which 'celebrates the neglected recesses of the commonplace'. '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. The critic Eve Patten praises "his defiant attachment to economy of form"... 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780372150

Book preview

FRANK ORMSBY

GOAT’S MILK

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.

James Simmons praised the ‘not so simple humanity’ of his early poems and their revelation of ‘quotidian miracles’. His first collection, A Store of Candles (1977), ranges in setting from Fermanagh, the border county in Northern Ireland where he grew up, to Troubles-torn Belfast, where he attended Queen’s University in the late 1960s and which has been his home ever since.

The lyrics in that collection often explore the intersection of private lives and public events, a preoccupation evident again in A Northern Spring (1986), where the central sequence re-creates the lives of American GIs stationed in Fermanagh in 1944 preparing for the Normandy landings. Ormsby here seeks to undermine the polarities of Northern Ireland by focussing on visitors to and settlers in the North – engaging ultimately with what he calls ‘the air-wide skin-tight multiple meaning of here’.

The complexities of ‘here’ and ‘home’ are to the fore again in The Ghost Train (1995), which is built around a more directly personal sequence about the joys and anxieties of expecting a child while a particularly bloody phase of the Troubles edges towards the first rumours of peace. Ormsby’s fourth collection, Fireflies (2009), reflects both the legacy of four decades of violence and the confident regeneration under way in Northern Ireland. Yet another sequence – a favourite structuring device in Ormsby’s poetry – is located in an area of New York State where the poet has been a visitor for over twelve years and records the liberating excitement of elsewhere and its fresh perspective on the familiar.

In his most recent poems Ormsby brings a new directness and simplicity to bear on the rural Fermanagh of his boyhood. A series of vignettes evokes his formative years, both his experience of division and loss (the impact of his father’s death is a constant theme in Ormsby’s work), but also the enriching aspects of family and community and of the natural world. These poems deepen and extend themes central to the earlier work. They also reflect what The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature describes as Ormsby’s gift for a ‘poetry of resonant minutiae’ which ‘celebrates the neglected recesses of the commonplace’.

‘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. The critic Eve Patten praises his defiant attachment to economy of form… 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.

Cover photograph: © plainpicture/Hollandse Hoogte

Frank Ormsby

Goat’s Milk

NEW & SELECTED POEMS

Introduction by

MICHAEL LONGLEY

For Karen and Helen

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction by

MICHAEL LONGLEY

from A STORE OF CANDLES (1977)

The Practical Farms

1 The Small Ads

2 Economies

3 A Fly in the Water

Landscape with Figures

Wet Leaves

Old Man on a Country Bus

McQuade

Calendars

Sheepman

My Friend Havelock Ellis

Spot the Ball

In Lieu of Carols

Stone

A Day in August

Ornaments

Winter Offerings

Mrs G. Watters

The Barracks

Windows

Moving In

Floods

In Memoriam

Passing the Crematorium

Aftermath

Under the Stairs

from A NORTHERN SPRING (1986)

Travelling

from A Northern Spring

1 The Clearing

3 Cleo, Oklahoma

4 Lesson of the War

5 The Padre

6 I Died In a Country Lane

8 I Stepped on a Small Landmine

9 For the Record

10 The Flamethrower

11 The Liberation

12 Maimed Civilians, Isigny

13 Apples, Normandy, 1944

14 They Buried Me in an Orchard

15 The Night I Lost World War II

18 On Devenish Island

23 Darkies

24 The Convoy

25 A Cross on a White Circle

26 Ste-Mère-Église

30 Soldier Bathing

31 Safe Home

33 From the German

35 Some of Us Stayed Forever

36 Postscripts

Home and Away

News from Home

My Careful Life

The Bees’ Nest

Dailies

The War Photographers

Street Life

1 Near Windsor Park

2 Slum Terrace

3 Mechanics

Survivors

Incurables

King William Park

Home

from THE GHOST TRAIN (1995)

Helen Keller

The Ghost Train

Geography

One Saturday

The Gatecrasher

The Gap on My Shelf

At Stoke Poges

The Graveyard School

from The Memoirs

In Retrospect

The Photograph

The Charlotte Gibson Bed

from A Paris Honeymoon

1 L’Orangerie

4 Le Père Lachaise

Lullaby

The Heart

You: The Movie

The Names

The Crossing

The Easter Ceasefire

Travellers

Come As You Are

Helen

from FIREFLIES (2009)

Fireflies

One Looks at One

The Kensico Dam

At the Lazy Boy Saloon and Ale Bar

from Valhalla Journal

1 Next Stop

3 In Kensico Cemetery

4 After the Storm

Stormy Night, Route 87

What Will Survive

New World

Two Birthday Poems

1 for Eoin Walden

2 for Conor Walden

Some Older American Poets

On Not Hearing the American Nightjar

Catching Fireflies

1 Fireflies in a Belfast Garden

2 After the Japanese

3 Firefly Hour

4 The Celtic Firefly

The Aluminium Box

Silent Reading

The Rabbit

Smiling Foetus

The Hole in the Roof

Blackbirds, North Circular Road

from City Journal

1 Aubade

3 The Shirt Factory

6 The Three Czechs

Small World

Colin Middleton: Lagan, Annadale (1941)

The Statues

The Gate

Some Spring Moons, North Circular Road

The Whooper Swan

The Builder

NEW POEMS (2015) 

I.

Goat’s Milk

Photograph

Vigil

Winter

Treasure

Beauties

Sim Sala Bim

Bog Cotton

The Listener

Water

The Dippers

Holy Ireland

Crossing the Border

The Eleventh Hour

Captain Richard Outram Hermon

The Shoot

The Crows

Paris

The Confession Box

Blessing

The Book Lovers

The Tilley Lamp

The Goats

Judy

The Last Train

Tinkers

Dawn

Home Is the Hero

Cold Cases

Too Late to Ask

The Darkie

My Criminal Record

In the Dark

The Death of Brian Ború

Wake

Last Glimpse

My Father’s Funeral

Remains

II.

The Second Joyful Mystery

The Birds

Forty Shades of Green

Small World (2)

Overdue

For Gabrielle

The Hour-glass

The Zebra Fish

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Way back in