Fireflies

Frank Ormsby's new collection travels among places strange and familiar: from the shaping memories of an upbringing in rural County Fermanagh, to a Belfast reinventing itself in a new century and the exhilarating novelty of America. In the first part of Fireflies Ormsby explores the past and vibrant present of an area of New York State which he has visited for the past twelve years. It remains to him as elusive as the 'fugitive selves' of the fireflies of the title. The latter part of the book engages with the poet's experience of his native Northern Ireland – the sour legacy of the Troubles, the dynamics of a community extending and remaking itself. Ormsby says he is by nature an 'anxious optimist', and these precisely lyrical poems are by turns elegiac and celebratory.