The Tumbling Paddy

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).