{"id":8803,"date":"2017-11-27T18:41:08","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T17:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8803"},"modified":"2017-11-27T18:44:33","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T17:44:33","slug":"frank-ormsby-the-darkness-of-snow-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8803","title":{"rendered":"Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"
Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow<\/em> (Bloodaxe, \u00a39.95).<\/h5>\n

Frank Ormsby\u2019s last book, Goat\u2019s Milk<\/em>, was a New and Selected<\/em> giving a rich retrospective on a poet who was part of the flowering of poetry from Ulster that emerged in the shadows of The Troubles. That flowering gave us, firstly, Heaney, Longley and Mahon, and in its second efflorescence give us Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and Tom Paulin. The received wisdom is that Ormsby\u2019s output as a poet has perhaps been somewhat overshadowed by those other writers. In part, that overshadowing is due to the paucity of Ormsby\u2019s production. Between 1977 and 2009, Ormsby produced only four books of poetry, although Goat\u2019s Milk<\/em> contained a substantial group of new poems. The distance between those early poems and this new collection does not always seem to be forty years. The first collection contained poems which described the world of his childhood, and so does the new book. Goat\u2019s Milk<\/em> contained the sequence \u2018A Northern Spring\u2019, which was a series of short, lyric monologues in the voice of those experiencing the Second World War. The Darkness of Snow<\/em> contains two sequences: \u2018Twenty-Six Irish Paintings\u2019, which is as the title suggests, and \u2018The Parkinson\u2019s Poems\u2019, which, again, is relatively self-explanatory.<\/p>\n

In Goat\u2019s Milk<\/em>, too, there was an wide range of styles and approaches. Ormsby has shown himself adept at both formal poetry and looser, much freer, less intense writing at all periods of his writing. \u2018The Parkinson\u2019s Poems\u2019, are a case in point. Physical illness has become a bit of a staple of some contemporary writing recently. However, Ormsby shows no inclination, in this book, to join the world of misery memoir. There is a lightness of touch in these poems which makes them more poignant. In the Parkinson\u2019s poem, there is a small group of three poems entitled, \u2018Hallucinations\u2019; in the midst of which Ormsby notes, \u2018these creatures who live in my head – \/ a troop of Ariels, or some nifty cirque du soleil<\/em>\/ acrobats and clowns\u2019, then later, \u2018I may never be rid of them, though\/ leave taking seems to be their speciality. They zip away\/ out of lamps, statues, vases, cushions, chairs\/ but without the words or gestures.\u2019 These quiet, unadorned descriptions make the experiences more real and more poignant than louder intricacy.<\/p>\n

The third section of this generous book comprises \u2018Twenty-Six Irish Paintings\u2019, which the blurb tells us are based on \u2018the work of Irish painters in Normandy, Brittany and Belgium at the end of the 19th century.\u2019 These paintings provoke Ormsby into a range of approaches and styles, from the first-person monologue of \u2018Stanley Royle: the Goose Girl\u2019 and \u2018Joseph Malachy Kavanagh: Pursuing his Gentle Calling<\/em>\u2019, to the gentle self-irony of \u2018Norman Garstin: Madonna Lilies<\/em>\u2019, which begins \u2018Madonna lilies, nuns among flowers,\/ nuns of the middle air\u2026\u2019 and finishes, \u2018Girls of the middle air,\/ you have set me babbling,\/ lovely girls, mistresses every one.\/ Sensuous blooms\/ of the religio-erotic\/ madonna lilies.\u2019 And there is always Ormsby\u2019s characteristic generosity, as when he adopts the persona of the viewer in Kavanagh\u2019s \u2018Pursuing his Gentle Calling\u2019, \u2018Next time I\u2019ll spread the snows of Dublin,\/ the snows of Brittany around his feet.\/ I\u2019ll cure his limp and fill a pipe for him.\/ He will turn his back on me. He will walk away.\u2019 Thus, if Ormsby feels an empathetic connection, he\u2019s generous enough for that connection to be transient, where he feels able to offer what he can with no sense of required recompense. Ormsby\u2019s generosity pervades this book not only in the sequences, but also in the other delicate, graceful, individual lyrics which fill the book with precision and insight. <\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Bloodaxe, \u00a39.95). Frank Ormsby\u2019s last book, Goat\u2019s Milk, was a New and Selected giving a rich retrospective on a poet who was part of the flowering of poetry from Ulster that emerged in the shadows of The Troubles. That flowering gave us, firstly, Heaney, Longley and Mahon, and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"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, The Darkness of Snow, reviewed by Ian Pople - 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=8803\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Bloodaxe, \u00a39.95). 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