The Tumbling Paddy

Frank Ormsby was born in 1947, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and was educated at Queen's University in Belfast. Until 2010 he was Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His latest collections-- all from Wake Forest University Press-- are The Tumbling Paddy (2026), The Rain Barrel (2020), and The Darkness of Snow (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His retrospective Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (2015) includes work from four earlier collections, A Store of Candles (Oxford University Press, 1977), A Northern Spring (Secker & Warburg, 1986), The Ghost Train (The Gallery Press, 1995), and Fireflies (Carcanet, 2009), together with new poems, and was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize. He has edited a number of anthologies and other books, including The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (1991), A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992), and The Hip Flask: Short Poems from Ireland (2001), all from Blackstaff Press. He was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989 and has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. In 1992 he received the Cultural Traditions Award, given in memory of John Hewitt, and in 2002 the Lawrence O' Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the University of St. Thomas at St. Paul, Minnesota. Frank Ormsby served as the eighth Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2019 to 2022.