The beers of America find their local here,
the Dixie Crimson Voodoo, the Winter Hook,
the Magic Hat Fat Angel. Whole seasons have arrived
in brown bottles from Oregon and Vermont,
Wisconsin and Colorado, to be enjoyed
outdoors while the light holds or at lamplit tables.

from 'At the Lazy Boy Saloon and Ale Bar'

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. 

Contents


PART ONE
Fireflies
One Looks at One
The Kensico Dam
At the Lazy Boy Saloon and Ale Bar
Valhalla Journal
Next Stop
Cemetery Walks
In Kensico Cemetery
After the Storm
Immigrants
Stormy Night, Route 87
Dry Side or Wet Side?
Davis Brook
Washington’s Headquarters
What Will Survive
New World
Two Birthday Poems
Some Older American Poets
On Not Hearing the American Nightjar
Catching Fireflies
Fireflies in a Belfast Garden
After the Japanese
Firefly Hour
The Celtic Firefly

PART TWO
The Aluminium Box
Silent Reading
The Rabbit
Smiling Foetus
The Hole in the Roof
Blackbirds, North Circular Road
from City Journal
Aubade
The Ice-Bird
The Shirt Factory
Derelict Building, Limestone Road
Storm, North Circular Road, 2 a.m.
The Three Czechs
Small World
Leaving Minnesota
Colin Middleton, ‘Lagan, Annadale’ (1941)
The Telescope
The Statues
The Gate
Avigliana
Some Spring Moons, North Circular Road
The Whooper Swan
The Builder