Award-winning poet Frank Ormsby launches his eighth collection, The Tumbling Paddy, in conversation with writer Malachi O’Doherty. The poems include quirky descriptions of animals, reflections on death, and the quest through country and archives for Juggy, who is said to have lived in a tree on Florence Court estate in Co. Fermanagh. 

Since Frank is debilitated by Parkinson’s disease, about which he has written with wit and insight, the event may include some of Malachi’s recordings of Frank’s poems.

This event is at the Seamus Heaney Centre. 

Meet the poet

Frank Ormsby, raised in Fermanagh to be a star Gaelic footballer, discovered an alternative career path through poetry and education. He was a long time editor of The Honest Ulsterman and head of English at Inst. He later edited Poetry Ireland Review and, alongside Leontia Flynn, The Yellow Nib for the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast.

He is of the generation and has been a close companion of Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon.

As editor of several anthologies including A Rage For Order and Poets From The North of Ireland, he helped give public profiles to a wide range of local writers, both seasoned and emergent.

In 1992 he received the Cultural Traditions Award, given in memory of John Hewitt, and in 2002 he received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for poetry from the University of St Thomas at St Paul, Minnesota.