Book description
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 book engages with the poet's experience of his
native Northern Ireland - the sour legacy of the Troubles, the
dynamics of a community extending and remaking itself. Ormsby says he
is by nature an 'anxious optimist', and these precisely lyrical poems
are by turns elegiac and celebratory.
Selected as a Favourite Collection of 2010 - Morning Star '...humane
and attentive poems.' - John Greening, Times Literary Supplement, 30
July 2010 'Ormsby [...] is a mirror of his times.' - Philip McDonagh,
The Irish Times, 21 November 2009 Frank Ormsby was born in 1947 in
Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. He describes himself as by nature an 'anxious
optimist'. His work draws on his rural upbringing in Co Fermanagh but
increasingly reflects a sense of Belfast where has lived since 1998. He
is a graduate and postgraduate of Queen's University, Belfast and has
worked as an editor and published three collections of poems. In 1992 he
received the Cultural Traditions Awards in memory of John Hewitt and in
2002 the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award from the University of St Thomas
in St Paul, Minnesota. Since 1975 he has been Head of English at the
Royal Belfast Academical Institution.
