Frank Ormsby talks to Maurice Riordan

Frank Ormsby was Editor of The Honest Ulsterman during one of the most illustrious phases of Irish poetry. He talks about the involvement of poets such as Heaney, Longley, Carson and Muldoon, and his own long career as a writer. His poems – modest, humorous, deeply felt and generally slow to appear – have latterly been written in a “mad excitement” he remains suspicious of – “the belated release of something”. Ormsby also talks movingly about suffering from Parkinson’s disease and its effect on his writing. He reads his poem ‘Grandfather’s Week’, published in The Poetry Review, 105:4. His latest book is Goat's Milk, New & Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe in 2015.