Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection of poems is, on the whole, a playful book which constantly surprises us with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether as in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Then spirit of place is richly imagined, whether in the form of ‘Juggy’, the ‘simpleton’ sleepwalking through the estate, or the humanised tumbling paddy, both clumsy celebrant and instrument of refinement among the furrows. Elsewhere in the collection, Frank Ormsby demonstrates his skill with the resonant short poem. These pieces, mostly in haiku form, constitute a running tribute to the Japanese and Chinese poets he claims as his ‘oriental fathers’. Frank Ormsby is by turn movingly elegiac and wryly determined to allow death its dominion in the face of mortality and his experience of Parkinson’s disease.

Frank Ormsby's retrospective, Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015, and followed by his later collections The Darkness of Snow (2017), The Rain Barrel (2019), and now, The Tumbling Paddy (2026).

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When he explores again a lifetime’s themes and preoccupations, Frank Ormsby, like all true poets, mysteriously finds himself breaking new ground. Even more uncannily, several of his recent poems already read like classics. Wise and vulnerable, this poet courageously scans the horizons presented by illness and death. Love poet as well as elegist, he embraces heartbreak and gladness. Its depth of thought and emotion gives The Tumbling Paddy a sense of resurrection.

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The poems in Frank Ormsby’s seventh collection, The Rain Barrel, treat familiar objects with a slant charm, giving them histories, personalities, and minds of their own…The cadences of Ormsby’s verse create a subtle music, and (though he rarely uses set forms in this collection) makes use of rhyme that brings out the distinct accent of his poetry

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Ormsby has found his place and time in The Darkness of Snow. Ecological and political, personal and historical, these are songs of reconciliation by a poet who was always, in fact, a generous maker of his own peace processes, and exceptionally wise in the art of being human.