Frank Ormsby: 3 books

Introduced by Michael Longley, Goat's Milk is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Frank Ormsby, a central figure in the poetry of Northern Ireland for the past forty years. As well as a whole collection of new poems, it includes work from his four previous collections: A Store of Candles...

The Darkness of Snow is Frank Ormsby's most varied and versatile collection to date. It includes three substantial sets of poems whose themes are refreshingly and sometimes painfully new. One is a suite of poems – sombre, good-humoured, flippant – about the early stages of Parkinson's Disease....

Frank Ormsby's poetry is deep but never sententious, exhibits great technique but never flaunts it, is of the moment but never trendy. In his most recent volume, The Darkness of Snow, we see memories of his youth in Fermanagh as well as poems of adult years in Belfast, reflecting on the aftermath...