The Rain Barrel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Frank Ormsby's seventh collection of poems reflects not only the beauty of the Irish landscape and the sensuous and aesthetic impact of the small farms among which he grew up, but also the continuing violence of the 'Troubles'. Close to the surface of mountain and bogland lie the hidden graves of the 'Disappeared'. Ormsby continues to make vivid use of the short, resonant poems which were a striking feature of Goat's Milk and The Darkness of Snow. Here too the content is often delivered and reinforced through rich, contrasting images within or between poems: the scarlet flowers growing in a black kettle, the fuchsia that is both 'redolent of old battles' or a 'peaceful tapestry in the annals of stone'. Among the personae of the collection is the obliging father who volunteers to be buried by his children up to the neck in sand within sight of but some distance from the 'cold shadow of the mountain'. The elegiac note that echoes through the poems rarely darkens the mood. Ormsby’s wit and humour, his sly sense of the absurd and what might be called his affection for the living and the dead draw the reader into considering the conviction that it is sometimes 'possible to believe / that joy grows irresistibly at the roots of everything'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reaching back to remembered and imagined times, Belfast poet Ormsby (The Darkness of Snow) gives new life to old ways of knowing and writing in this frank and yearning seventh collection. "The whole season has come to this," he writes about "the last/ October leaf" but also, perhaps, about the book's modus operandi: "a holding on so that the letting go/ might seem to us like chance." Spare lines, tightly reined, deliver sure choices ("The minute we stop to listen/ the evening includes/ us and the white-throated birds,") and emotionally evocative descriptions: "the air clamorous/ with the language of dogs' names." Simple objects, no less sacred for their simplicity, here assume center stage. Short poems track the eponymous rain barrel from its installation through its many uses, to its recent replacement by the new model, a barrel, which "half the size/ does not command half the respect." The poet gazes with a clear eye into "the faceless, curled future" as a bomb ticks, undetected, in a woman's suitcase while she waits at the airport gate. Graves are tended, "search parties re-form" and "Somewhere to the left of my soul,/ there is a wake in progress,/ all day, every day." While some readers may resist the book's nostalgia for the past, others will admire its reflective and precise vision.
