‘Water’

Once described as “the quiet man of Northern Irish poetry”, Frank Ormsby falls between what might be called the first generation of modern Irish poets, such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and the second, including Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and Tom Paulin. His work as editor of The Honest Ulsterman throughout the Troubles kept the peacetime values of poetry alive. His anthology A Rage for Order (1992), meanwhile, showed the importance of giving often challenging and difficult material time to find, in the words of Michael Longley, its “imaginative depth”. When he was asked why so many of his poems focus on what the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature called “resonant minutiae”, he replied, “it stops you being pompous”.

“Water”, first published in the TLS in 1982, finds a plain-spoken place for the political in recollections of Ormsby’s Fermanagh childhood. Where Heaney draws powerful parallels between Iron Age bodies exhumed from the bog and the sacrificial victims of present-day sectarian violence, all Ormsby’s “boggy meadows” breed is his aunt’s bronchitis: “in her it found / its local habitation and its name”. The “oozy stream” yields nothing more sinister than the “green bottles” he has been cooling there. Political tensions are registered – the Orangeman’s drums seen from a bus, and the “kilted bandsmen / truculent in song” – but they take their place among all the other things brought to the surface of the rain-swollen ground, such as “The Joys of Shakespeare, raked from the town dump / The boards smok[ing] at the fire / until they had dried”. Ormsby’s bog is not defined by its prehistoric secrets; it is the land they walk on now.

Water

My aunt’s bronchitis filtered through the clays
of boggy meadows; the Brick Hole, the Long Moss.
A watery nothingness,
in her it found
its local habitation and its name.

I dredged green bottles from an oozy stream
in Necarne Woods. My brother heaved a spear
of sharpened hazel.
Stained light, blotched waterwords,
a ruined braille my hands might utter.

Flooding even in summer. Oily heads
in roadside fields where rats trawled for their lives.
Lambegs at a bus window, ringed with names,
and kilted bandsmen
truculent in song.

The year McMahon sank his spring well
at the hill’s soggy foot, I took to heart
The Joys of Shakespeare, raked from the town dump.
The boards smoked at the fire
until they had dried.

The house was built in a bog, so the floor sank
and the walls were damp:
lines in a blue notebook, pages aired
brown at the edges,
stains like watermarks.

Pumphouse, conduit, culvert, patterns of drains
like herring-fossils, channels, ditches, canals;
but the next downpour sinking
to meet the swell from underground,
the water there from the start.

FRANK ORMSBY (1982)

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