Reviewed by: Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby Thomas Dillon Redshaw Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems, by Frank Ormsby, pp. 192. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, $15.95. Goat’s Milk, Frank Ormsby’s latest collection, offers readers in North America a generous, yet discriminating survey of this Irish poet’s few but always timely collections. And American readers will find Michael Longley’s sweet introduction to Ormsby’s work both pointed and helpful. Indeed, the steady reader of Irish poetry from the mid 1960s on—an arousing phenomenon itself—will be reminded by the poems here of the standard of feeling and invention set by Ormsby’s four prior collections dating from A Store of Candles in 1977. There [End Page 152] Ormsby takes his first hikes into America, as when he ventriloquizes a Basque shepherd in Idaho or Montana drinking alone in a cattleman’s pub: Unbowed I claim my rights—to herd alone,and be accepted. When I skirtthe rim of cattle drives, salute me,and when I come to share your bunkhouse fire,make room. For “Basque,” read “poet” and you will overhear one strand of Ormsby’s allegory. To begin with, Ormsby’s Fermanagh countryside is not Heaney’s, though near allied. In A Store of Candles, Ormsby’s territory is the townscapes of the North summed up in Belfast where each council house, new or old, has a stair cupboard where one can find “a store of candles for when the light fails.” And there you might find, all marked up, a forgotten copy of A Store of Candles, after which Ormsby fell silent. Indeed, between each collection since then has come a pause when Ormsby gave forethought to the new life of each new poem, rather as Elizabeth Bishop did. Like hers, his writing life has had its interruptions. We cannot forget, of course, that Ormsby made and remade his familial and poetic life in the Northern Ireland of the long “Troubles,” in Belfast of the fortified pub and burnt-out row houses. He was there pretty much from the beginning. He was there early and late with his editorship of the Honest Ulster-man, from 1969 to 1989. He was there with anthologies like Poets from the North of Ireland (1979), A Rage for Order (1992), or The Hip Flask (2001). The Northern “Troubles” also provide one reason why Ormsby’s poems can come as such a surprise. The “Troubles” encouraged readers to take Northern poetry as an exceptional tradition whose renovations might assuage decades of social and cultural impasse. Poetry from the North, though, is the Red Branch of Irish poetry after World War II, and especially so when the prestige of Seamus Heaney came to anchor the regional driftings of Irish poetry. In this circumstance, a poet of Ormsby’s temper stands the risk of being noted or footnoted without being read or heard—and that is why Wake Forest University Press deserves a salute for bringing Goat’s Milk to American readers. Looking for direct political engagement or confessional outrage or sociologized good will, American readers will be disappointed. Ormsby is always after elements truer and more difficult than those. Like Ormsby, since the 1970s on the best of Irish poets are after elements in the “Matter of Ireland” that once escaped articulation because deemed “unpoetic” in the way that American critics of the same decades have, for example, find Karl Shapiro’s poetry “unpoetic.” Ormsby addressed these unspoken elements back in 1986 in A Northern Spring by giving voice to the American “invasion” of Northern Ireland in advance of D-Day. Listen to “For the Record” from A Northern Spring (1986): [End Page 153] Cornered at St.-Malouf, I shot my wayto a medal and commendation (posthumous),a credit at last to my parents, whoever they were,and the first hero produced by the State Pen. To that tour de force Ormsby pinned two notable poems pertinent to the “Troubles.” In “The War Photographers,” Ormsby steps back and points out the art in the visible proofs of human cruelty. Anticipating disillusionments North and South, the wry confession “My Careful...
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Jan 2, 2018
Christopher Lyle Johnstone + 1
Open Access