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The Tumbling Paddy, Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection, brings together many of his time- honored themes—landscape, the rural life, the making of poetry—and layers them with an elegiac sense of time passing and illness gathering. Beginning with a sequence on the Florence Court mansion of County Fermanagh and the nearby Marble Arch Caves, the poems often go spelunking through histories lost in the dark, while the concluding sequence, “Autumn Burials,” lowers its voice to the whisper of death: “I gather the notes I have made for a poem, / like crumpled blossoms retrieved from a coffin lid.” Throughout, Ormsby balances reverence with his wry sense of humor, and sometimes bawdy touch, as well as his penchant for the miniature poem, continuing his long-running “Small World” haiku series. The book’s title poem, describing a hay rake, gathers many of Ormsby’s themes into one symbol. Presenting rural life in decline, or the poet’s experience living with Parkinson’s disease, the tumbling paddy moves “like a clumsy clockwork,” “perfecting the work of the harrow” to turn a crop (of poetry). Another poem, “Landscapes,” transposes the field to art in “a gallery the size of Ireland”—“In a country newly ours, / we move from field to gallery, / from gallery to field.”
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.
