The Rain Barrel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Frank Ormsby's enchanting new volume, The Rain Barrel, allows us to see with eyes "still wet from the Creation." He is a "local fire-god with a tongue of flowers." His sense of the folkloric and country life in general is self-assured and true, but he also writes with flair and insight on such subjects as art and artists. He has mastered the Haiku, the erotic poem, and, throughout his storied career, the wistful but unsentimental elegy: "The whole season has come to this: / a holding on so that the letting go / might seem to us like chance." The title sequence ties these themes together in a meditation on the object, its uses and symbols, until in the last poem of the sequence he reflects on how like the barrel we are, fulfilling our roles as we deteriorate beyond repair.
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.
