{"id":4560,"date":"2015-03-16T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T09:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4560"},"modified":"2016-01-23T16:08:23","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T15:08:23","slug":"frank-ormsby-goats-milk-new-and-selected-poems-reviewed-by-david-cooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4560","title":{"rendered":"Frank Ormsby, Goat\u2019s Milk<\/em> (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a312.00, reviewed by David Cooke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Goat\u2019s Milk, New and Selected Poems <\/i>by <\/i>Frank Ormsby, <\/i>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 \u2018Introduction\u2019 by Michael Longley in which he explores Ormsby\u2019s virtues as a poet and his significance in the history of Northern Irish poetry. As the editor of The<\/i> Honest Ulsterman <\/i>from 1969 to 1989, Ormsby was a key figure in Ulster\u2019s much-hyped poetic renaissance. \u00a0He has also edited the Collected Poems of John Hewitt <\/i>(1991) and several important anthologies, including A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles <\/i>(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 <\/i>(1977) and A Northern Spring<\/i> (1986), were both PBS Choices.<\/p>\n

Turning now to this new selection, its opening poem, \u2018The Practical Farms\u2019 is a sequence of three typically brief lyrics which home in on the details of rural life:<\/p>\n

The small ads give notice of a world
\nwhere little is wasted. All that is practical
\nis in demand and someone will sell,
\nlinkbox and harrow, milk churn and steel can
\nand paling post in search of new masters.
\nFor heavy working boots Balfour\u2019s Your man.<\/p>\n

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: \u2018Men who live \/ by sweat and commerce share the pointed ways \/ of sober print \u2013 terse, almost oppressive.\u2019 The third poem in the sequence, \u2018A Fly in the Water\u2019, with its\u00a0 image of man in a rowboat, picks up on this and hints at the possibility of escape: \u2018I\u2019d like to think he has cast off \/\u00a0 by choice from the practical farms, \/\u00a0 his leisurely track \/ a clean act of indulgence.\u2019 In \u2018Winter Offerings\u2019 the protagonist is a son addressing his mother. Evoking her circumscribed existence, he now acknowledges their increasing separation: \u2018Each visit home \/ I measure distances and find them grown.\u2019<\/p>\n

In his \u2018Introduction\u2019 Michael Longley refers to what he calls \u2018Troubles trash\u2019 and Ormsby\u2019s 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. \u2018The Barracks\u2019 describes a woman tending her garden as if she is oblivious of the bigger picture:<\/p>\n

The fences high as the building, awkward bars
\nof ramps in the roadway fail now to disturb
\nher rapt attention. Yards from the sandbags
\nand the hidden guns she moves in sunlight,
\nher hands in the tall flowers unperturbed.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Sheepman\u2019 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:<\/p>\n

Even the barflies move to corner tables,
\nmouthing \u2018Sheepman\u2019. The barman serves,
\nbut grudgingly. Like Mexicans and half-
\nbreeds I must wear that special hangdog look,
\nsay nothing.<\/p>\n

It concludes with a plea for human solidarity: \u2018When I skirt \/ the rim of cattle drives, salute me, \/ and when I come to share your bunkhouse fire, \/ make room.\u2019<\/p>\n

With A Northern Spring<\/i> (1986) there is a more obvious widening of perspective. \u2018Travelling\u2019 depicts an old lady who kept a \u2018French journal\u2019 and who, in her head at least, travelled widely until \u2018She died in her Russian phase.\u2019 Moreover, by the mid-Eighties the ethnicity of the Northern Irish population had changed. \u00a0There are Vietnamese boat-people in a poem called \u2018Home\u2019; while in \u2018Street Life\u2019 the poet tries to imagine \u2018the first Chinese striker in the Irish League\u2019.\u00a0 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\u2019s an absorbing piece of work in which private lives are set against the backdrop of history. In \u2018Cleo, Oklahoma\u2019 \u2018The Mayor struck a pose \/ for a possible statue.\u2019 In \u2018Lesson of the War\u2019 <\/i>an adolescent boy spots a local girl and a soldier having sex in a field. When he tells his father the latter snaps: \u2018I wish this war, this fuckin\u2019 war was over\u2019. As in his previous work, the poet has a real eye for character: like the delinquent in \u2018For the Record\u2019 <\/i>who finds \u2018no poolrooms or waterfront hotel\u2019, but \u2018enough fresh air to poison a city boy\u2019. Throughout the sequence there is plenty of dark humour and irony.\u00a0 In \u2018I Stepped on a Small Landmine\u2019 <\/i>a dead soldier is honoured by \u2018the committee for white heroes\u2019 who are unaware that the testicles of Leroy Earl Johnson are now amongst his remains. In \u2018A Cross on a White Circle\u2019 we learn that the ability to read a map is a matter of life and death: \u2018In the time it takes to tell Bretteville sur Laize \/ from Bretteville le Rabet, twelve of us died\u2019.<\/p>\n

With Ghost Train<\/i> (1995) the focus becomes more directly personal. There are elegies for the poet\u2019s father and love poems, such as \u2018L\u2019Orangerie\u2019 in which the poet plays with the imagery of \u2018Monet\u2019s pond\u2019: \u2018Your face grows secret and lovely. It is a face \/ of many fathoms in this time and place\u2019. Moving, too, are those poems in which a couple await the birth of their child. This is expressed most memorably in \u2018The Easter Ceasefire\u2019, where fears about a possible miscarriage mirror the tentative progress towards a more peaceful life: \u2018In the fraught silence between \/ might-be and might-have-been, \/ we edged towards Saturday and the hoped-for-all-clear\u2019.<\/p>\n

It was to be another fourteen years before the appearance of Ormsby\u2019s next collection, Fireflies<\/i> (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\u2019s development. The \u2018fireflies\u2019 of his title poem seem to point towards a more insouciant, \u2018throwaway\u2019 style:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Impossible not to share
\nthat sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we- now
\ndalliance with night, such soothing restlessness \u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026 Those fugitive selves,<\/p>\n

winged and random! Our flickery might-have- beens
\ncome up from the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be
\nas tentative frolic!<\/p>\n

\u2018Kensico Dam\u2019 is a brilliantly sustained meditation on the topsy-turvy world of a submerged town with \u2018its weathercocks askew \/ in a climate they never expected.\u2019 In \u2018Stormy Night, Route 87\u2019 the poet is thundering along behind trucks \u2018lit up like fairground trailers\u2019 and seems exhilarated by every sight and sound: \u2018the restless by-notes of a thunderous score \/ in ghostly lightning.\u2019 Perhaps most exuberant of all is \u2018At the Lazy Boy Saloon and Ale Bar\u2019 with its litany of bars and beer brands, in which Ormsby seems to have set himself the task of reinventing Ben\u00e9t\u2019s \u2018American Names\u2019. The momentum of these poems, inspired perhaps by a reading of Galway Kinnell, is balanced by others informed by the spirit of Basho. In \u2018After the Japanese\u2019 the influence is made explicit; however in \u2018Small World\u2019 the imagery of the haiku seems inseparable from that of the early Irish glosses:<\/p>\n

Sensing a haiku
\nopportunity \u2013 those two
\nblackbirds, right on cue.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018The Eleventh Hour\u2019 Ulster is seen \u00a0as \u2018the one patch on the planet \/\u00a0 where the poppy is a sectarian flower;\u2019 while \u2018The Confession Box\u2019 is a classic statement of Catholic guilt: \u2018its walls seasoned \/ with impure thoughts and actions, \/ some of them mine.\u2019 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.
\n 
\nDavid Cooke<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goat\u2019s 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 \u2018Introduction\u2019 by Michael Longley in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrank Ormsby, Goat\u2019s Milk (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a312.00, reviewed by David Cooke - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4560\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frank Ormsby, Goat\u2019s Milk (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a312.00, reviewed by David Cooke - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Goat\u2019s Milk, New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby, is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a significant Ulster poet. 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