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