Frank Ormsby: The Parkinson's Poems

Frank Ormsby introduces and reads three poems from The Parkinson’s Poems, from his 2017 collection The Darkness of Snow: ‘Agitans’, ‘Side Effects (1)’ and ‘Once a Day’. These are from a suite of poems – sombre, good-humoured, flippant – about the early stages of Parkinson's Disease. Ormsby was diagnosed as having the disease in 2011.

Neil Astley filmed Frank Ormsby reading and discussing his work at his home in Belfast in April 2019. Separate videos are posted of him reading selections of poems from each of his three Bloodaxe titles, including one of him reading seven other poems from The Darkness of Snow (https://vimeo.com/459102800/).

Frank Ormsby has been a central figure in the poetry of Northern Ireland for the past forty years. Born in 1947, in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, he was editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1969 to 1989, and Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution until retiring in 2010. In 2019 he was appointed Ireland Professor of Poetry for the next three years. In 2015 Bloodaxe published his retrospective Goat’s Milk: New & Selected Poems, drawing on work from four previous collections, A Store of Candles (1977), A Northern Spring (1986), The Ghost Train (1995) and Fireflies (2009) as well as a collection of new poems. This was followed by two later collections, The Darkness of Snow (2017), and The Rain Barrel (2019). For more information on The Darkness of Snow please see https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-darkness-of-snow-1152