Goat’s Milk, New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby, is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a significant Ulster poet. It brings together work from four previous collections and forty six new poems which have the thematic and stylistic coherence of a further individual collection. The volume also contains a substantial ‘Introduction’ by Michael Longley in which he explores Ormsby’s virtues as a poet and his significance in the history of Northern Irish poetry. As the editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989, Ormsby was a key figure in Ulster’s much-hyped poetic renaissance.  He has also edited the Collected Poems of John Hewitt (1991) and several important anthologies, including A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992). Perhaps, like many another busy editor, such work has taken time and focus away from his own poetry. Moreover, like Larkin, an early influence, Ormsby is a fastidious poet who has been slow to publish, taking more than four decades to produce four thin volumes. There may be other reasons, too, why he does not have that wider readership he deserves beyond his native patch. Heaney, Longley, and Mahon, were hard acts to follow and even in the next generation he was overshadowed by his contemporaries: Carson, Paulin, McGuckian, Muldoon. None of which is to say that Ormsby has not had his admirers or received any recognition at all in the UK. His first two collections, A Store of Candles (1977) and A Northern Spring (1986), were both PBS Choices.

Turning now to this new selection, its opening poem, ‘The Practical Farms’ is a sequence of three typically brief lyrics which home in on the details of rural life:

The small ads give notice of a world
where little is wasted. All that is practical
is in demand and someone will sell,
linkbox and harrow, milk churn and steel can
and paling post in search of new masters.
For heavy working boots Balfour’s Your man.

Seeming to extol the virtues of thrift and honest labour, this might seem at first to be little more than an exercise in nostalgia, yet one detects also a discordant note: ‘Men who live / by sweat and commerce share the pointed ways / of sober print – terse, almost oppressive.’ The third poem in the sequence, ‘A Fly in the Water’, with its  image of man in a rowboat, picks up on this and hints at the possibility of escape: ‘I’d like to think he has cast off /  by choice from the practical farms, /  his leisurely track / a clean act of indulgence.’ In ‘Winter Offerings’ the protagonist is a son addressing his mother. Evoking her circumscribed existence, he now acknowledges their increasing separation: ‘Each visit home / I measure distances and find them grown.’

In his ‘Introduction’ Michael Longley refers to what he calls ‘Troubles trash’ and Ormsby’s refusal to allow his art to degenerate into propaganda. However, this is not to say that he has been untouched by politics or the historical situation in which he grew up. ‘The Barracks’ describes a woman tending her garden as if she is oblivious of the bigger picture:

The fences high as the building, awkward bars
of ramps in the roadway fail now to disturb
her rapt attention. Yards from the sandbags
and the hidden guns she moves in sunlight,
her hands in the tall flowers unperturbed.

In ‘Sheepman’ he finds an image from the movies to evoke the sectarianism of his own small province and that of divided societies everywhere. It is a classic formulation:

Even the barflies move to corner tables,
mouthing ‘Sheepman’. The barman serves,
but grudgingly. Like Mexicans and half-
breeds I must wear that special hangdog look,
say nothing.

It concludes with a plea for human solidarity: ‘When I skirt / the rim of cattle drives, salute me, / and when I come to share your bunkhouse fire, / make room.’

With A Northern Spring (1986) there is a more obvious widening of perspective. ‘Travelling’ depicts an old lady who kept a ‘French journal’ and who, in her head at least, travelled widely until ‘She died in her Russian phase.’ Moreover, by the mid-Eighties the ethnicity of the Northern Irish population had changed.  There are Vietnamese boat-people in a poem called ‘Home’; while in ‘Street Life’ the poet tries to imagine ‘the first Chinese striker in the Irish League’.  However, the greater part of this collection is taken up with its title sequence in which Ormsby explores the experiences of American GIs stationed in Ulster during WW2. It’s an absorbing piece of work in which private lives are set against the backdrop of history. In ‘Cleo, Oklahoma’ ‘The Mayor struck a pose / for a possible statue.’ In ‘Lesson of the War’ an adolescent boy spots a local girl and a soldier having sex in a field. When he tells his father the latter snaps: ‘I wish this war, this fuckin’ war was over’. As in his previous work, the poet has a real eye for character: like the delinquent in ‘For the Record’ who finds ‘no poolrooms or waterfront hotel’, but ‘enough fresh air to poison a city boy’. Throughout the sequence there is plenty of dark humour and irony.  In ‘I Stepped on a Small Landmine’ a dead soldier is honoured by ‘the committee for white heroes’ who are unaware that the testicles of Leroy Earl Johnson are now amongst his remains. In ‘A Cross on a White Circle’ we learn that the ability to read a map is a matter of life and death: ‘In the time it takes to tell Bretteville sur Laize / from Bretteville le Rabet, twelve of us died’.

With Ghost Train (1995) the focus becomes more directly personal. There are elegies for the poet’s father and love poems, such as ‘L’Orangerie’ in which the poet plays with the imagery of ‘Monet’s pond’: ‘Your face grows secret and lovely. It is a face / of many fathoms in this time and place’. Moving, too, are those poems in which a couple await the birth of their child. This is expressed most memorably in ‘The Easter Ceasefire’, where fears about a possible miscarriage mirror the tentative progress towards a more peaceful life: ‘In the fraught silence between / might-be and might-have-been, / we edged towards Saturday and the hoped-for-all-clear’.

It was to be another fourteen years before the appearance of Ormsby’s next collection, Fireflies (2009), in which we see him at his most assured and certainly his most exuberant. Much of the work included here is set in the United States and the headlong rush of some of the poems marks a new stage in the poet’s development. The ‘fireflies’ of his title poem seem to point towards a more insouciant, ‘throwaway’ style:

                          Impossible not to share
that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we- now
dalliance with night, such soothing restlessness …

… Those fugitive selves,

winged and random! Our flickery might-have- beens
come up from the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be
as tentative frolic!

‘Kensico Dam’ is a brilliantly sustained meditation on the topsy-turvy world of a submerged town with ‘its weathercocks askew / in a climate they never expected.’ In ‘Stormy Night, Route 87’ the poet is thundering along behind trucks ‘lit up like fairground trailers’ and seems exhilarated by every sight and sound: ‘the restless by-notes of a thunderous score / in ghostly lightning.’ Perhaps most exuberant of all is ‘At the Lazy Boy Saloon and Ale Bar’ with its litany of bars and beer brands, in which Ormsby seems to have set himself the task of reinventing Benét’s ‘American Names’. The momentum of these poems, inspired perhaps by a reading of Galway Kinnell, is balanced by others informed by the spirit of Basho. In ‘After the Japanese’ the influence is made explicit; however in ‘Small World’ the imagery of the haiku seems inseparable from that of the early Irish glosses:

Sensing a haiku
opportunity – those two
blackbirds, right on cue.

In his more recent work it is this approach that the poet favours, in poems that by and large revisit themes well established elsewhere: family memories, elegies, rural life, the sectarian divide. In ‘The Eleventh Hour’ Ulster is seen  as ‘the one patch on the planet /  where the poppy is a sectarian flower;’ while ‘The Confession Box’ is a classic statement of Catholic guilt: ‘its walls seasoned / with impure thoughts and actions, / some of them mine.’ Reading these new poems and returning to those read decades ago has been a delight because Ormsby is a poet of enviable gifts. He has a fine ear and a sharp eye and, above all, his poems are memorable.
 
David Cooke

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