Fireflies (Oxford Poets) - Softcover

Frank Ormsby's new collection travels among places strange and familiar: from the shaping memories of an upbringing in rural County Fermanagh, to a Belfast reinventing itself in a new century and the exhilarating novelty of America. In the first part of Fireflies Ormsby explores the past and vibrant present of an area of New York State which he has visited for the past twelve years. It remains to him as elusive as the 'fugitive selves' of the fireflies of the title. The latter part of the book engages with the poet's experience of his native Northern Ireland - the sour legacy of the Troubles, the dynamics of a community extending and remaking itself. Ormsby says he is by nature an 'anxious optimist', and these precisely lyrical poems are by turns elegiac and celebratory.

Frank Ormsby was born Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, in 1947. He is a graduate and postgraduate of Queen's University, Belfast. He has published three collections of poems: A Store of Candles (1977), A NorthernSpring (1986) and The Ghost Train (1995), and was an editor of The Honest Ulsterman magazine from 1969 until 1989. Frank Ormsby has edited anumber of books and anthologies, including: Poets from the North of Ireland(1979; second edition, 1990); The Long Embrace: Twentieth Century Love Poems(1987); The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (1991); A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992); The Blackbird's Nest: An Anthology of Poetry from Queen's University Belfast (2006). With Michael Longley, he co-edited John Hewitt's Selected Poems in 2007. In 1992 he received the Cultural Traditions Award in memory of John Hewitt and in 2002 the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. Since 1975 he has been Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.