The Tumbling Paddy

Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection of poems is, on the whole, a playful book which constantly surprises us with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether as in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Then spirit of place is richly imagined, whether in the form of ‘Juggy’, the ‘simpleton’ sleepwalking through the estate, or the humanised tumbling paddy, both clumsy celebrant and instrument of refinement among the furrows.

Elsewhere in the collection, Frank Ormsby demonstrates his skill with the resonant short poem. These pieces, mostly in haiku form, constitute a running tribute to the Japanese and Chinese poets he claims as his ‘oriental fathers’.

Frank Ormsby is by turn movingly elegiac and wryly determined to allow death its dominion in the face of mortality and his experience of Parkinson’s disease.

‘Ormsby's tremendous poems loom out of darkness, shot with stars, lit with sound so that when they move to the final Spartan sequence, Autumn Burials, that music and precision is a profound comfort.’ – Martina Evans, The Irish Times, on The Tumbling Paddy

‘When he explores again a lifetime’s themes and preoccupations, Frank Ormsby, like all true poets, mysteriously finds himself breaking new ground. Even more uncannily, several of his recent poems already read like classics. Wise and vulnerable, this poet courageously scans the horizons presented by illness and death. Love poet as well as elegist, he embraces heartbreak and gladness. Its depth of thought and emotion gives The Tumbling Paddy a sense of resurrection.’ – Michael Longley

Frank Ormsby's retrospective, Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015, and followed by his later collections The Darkness of Snow (2017) and The Rain Barrel (2019).

Frank Ormsby was born in 1947, in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and was educated at Queen's University in Belfast. Until 2010 he was Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His latest collections are The Tumbling Paddy (Bloodaxe Books, 2026), The Rain Barrel (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) and The Darkness of Snow (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award in the US. His retrospective Goat’s Milk: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), includes work from four earlier 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), together with new poems, and was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. He has edited a number of anthologies and other books, including Northern Windows: An Anthology of Ulster Autobiography (1987), Thine in Storm and Calm: An Amanda McKittrick Ros Reader (1988), The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (1991), A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992) and The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland (2001), all from Blackstaff Press, and The Blackbird's Nest (2006), an anthology of poems from Queen's University, Belfast. Frank Ormsby was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989, and has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. In 1992 he received the Cultural Traditions Award, given in memory of John Hewitt, and in 2002 the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the University of St Thomas at St Paul, Minnesota. Frank Ormsby was guest of honour at BBC Proms in the Park 2017 at Castle Coole in Northern Ireland; actor Adrian Dunbar read two poems from Goat’s Milk: New & Selected Poems accompanied by the Ulster Orchestra and harpist Richard Allen in a specially commissioned work by Graeme Stewart. In 2018 Frank Ormsby collaborated with singer/songwriter Anthony Toner on an album The Kiss of Light. The album features recordings of Frank reading eleven of his own poems, with each reading followed by a short instrumental composed by Anthony Toner in response to the poems. Frank Ormsby served as the eighth Ireland Professor of Poetry from 1 November 2019 until 31 October 2022 and was succeeded by Paul Muldoon.