Frank Ormsby

Francis Arthur Ormsby (born Irvinestown, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland in 1947) is an Irish poet.^[1]

He was educated at St Michael's College, Enniskillen and Queen's University Belfast. He was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989, and has also edited the Poetry Ireland Review. From 1976 until his retirement in 2010 he was Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.

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.

Recently he has returned to writing with a new collection Fireflies, published by Carcanet in 2009. The work features poems set in rural Fermanagh, Belfast and America.

Publications

• Ripe for Company, Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1971.
• A Store of Candles, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• A Northern Spring, London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
• The Ghost Train, Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1995.
• Fireflies, Manchester: Carcanet / Oxford Poets, 2009.

Edited volumes

• Poets from the North of Ireland, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1979; revised edition, 1990.
• Northern Windows: An Anthology of Ulster Autobiography, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987.
• The Long Embrace: Twentieth Century Irish Love Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 1987.
• Thine in Storm and Calm: An Amanda McKittrick Ros Reader, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1988.
• The Collected Poems of John Hewitt, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991.
• A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1992.
• The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001.
• The Blackbird's Nest: An Anthology of Poetry from Queen's University Belfast, Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2006.
• The Selected Poems of John Hewitt (co-edited with Michael Longley), Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2007.

References

External links

• Frank Ormsby, Some Older American Poets by Frank Ormsby, The Guardian, 17 October 2009
• Carol Rumens, Poem of the week: Fireflies by Frank Ormsby, The Guardian, 19 December 2011
• Frank Ormsby, Bog Cotton, The New Yorker, March 4, 2013

See also

• List of Northern Irish writers