The Rain Barrel

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY FEB 17, 2020

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.