CELEBRATED Northern Ireland poet Frank Ormsby will be launching his latest book of collected works in Belfast next week.
Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems includes contemporary pieces from the Co Fermanagh-born writer along with previously published verse from his four existing collections; A Store of Candles (Oxford University Press, 1977), A Northern Spring (Secker & Warburg, 1986), The Ghost Train (Gallery Press, 1995) and Fireflies (Carcanet, 2009).
At 6.30pm on Wednesday March 25, Ormsby will be introduced at McMordie Hall, School of Music, Queen's University Belfast by another leading light of local poetry, Michael Longley, who has also penned the introduction for the new publication from Bloodaxe Books. Formerly head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Ormsby was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989 and also edited Poetry Ireland Review.
His first collection, A Store of Candles (1977), ranged in setting from Fermanagh, the border county in Northern Ireland where he grew up, to Troubles-torn Belfast, where he attended Queen's University in the late 1960s and which has been his home ever since.
In his most recent poems, Ormsby brings a new directness and simplicity to bear on the rural Fermanagh of his boyhood. A series of vignettes evokes his formative years: his experience of division and loss (the impact of his father's death is a constant theme) and also the enriching aspects of family, community and of the natural world.
* For more details on the Goat's Milk launch, contact organiser David Torrans at No Alibis in Belfast on 028 9031 9601.
David Roy