ALTHOUGH he was the Guest of Honour at the BBC NI Proms in the Park event on Saturday night, Irvinestown poet, Frank Ormsby, stood on stage before a crowd of 6,000 people with his own special tribute to make to his home county.
As a lad growing up in Fermanagh he always found inspiration from the rugged natural beauty of the landscape. 
And having caught the ‘poetry bug’ at the age of 11, that inspiration has stayed with him throughout his writing career.
“I don’t think I really appreciated Fermanagh’s landscape until I left and went to live in Belfast,” he told the audience on Saturday night, “So then I spent the rest of my life looking back on Fermanagh and writing poems about it.”
His latest collection of poetry, ‘The Darkness of Snow’ includes a number of poems about his homeland.
Ahead of his book launch at the end of this month, two of Mr. Ormsby’s poems from a previous collection, were recited on stage at Castle Coole on Saturday by renowned Fermanagh actor, Adrian Dunbar, against a specially composed score as beautiful scenery from the poet’s home county were projected across the National Trust property’s estate.
Mr. Ormsby retired as the Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in 2010.
“It turns out, the man who composed the score, Graeme Stewart, is actually a former pupil of mine,” he told the Impartial Reporter this week.
“I was given a bound copy of the composed piece, ‘A lull between the Showers’ on stage and inside it was a personal card from Graeme. I intend to get in touch with him to thank him for such a kind gesture.”
Reflecting on the Proms tribute Mr. Ormsby is very gracious.
“The largest audience I had ever stood in front of before the weekend was around 1,000 people -- 6,000 looks quite different!
“Nobody had to do this, it wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t. But there is something very thoughtful and sensitive about it all and I think the person I have to thank most there is Feargal O’Kane, the producer, and a Fermanagh man himself!”
Central to Mr. Ormsby’s new poetry collection is a sequence of poems dealing with Parkinson’s Disease, from which the poet suffers himself.
‘The Parkinsons Poems’ give an honest account of his own experiences of the illness, including the side effects of the medication he takes daily and they are now being used as a teaching aid at the Division of Nursing at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.
“I have been over to Edinburgh to take a seminar or work shop with undergraduates and also with the staff who teach them,” he says, “And I have also been asked to write an article for a nurses’ research magazine. It is wonderful to know these poems are being used for such valuable work.”
In his earlier years at Queen’s University, Mr. Ormsby was taught by none other than Seamus Heaney.
“When my first proper poem was published in The Honest Ulsterman, it was a real ‘Heaney Poem’,” says Mr. Ormsby.
“The editor of the Honest Ulsterman at the time, James Simmons, said it was a ‘pastiche of Seamus!’.
“But he accepted it anyway.”
Just a few years later, Mr. Ormsby became the editor of the Honest Ulsterman himself, continuing in this role for 20 years, up until 1989.
He reflects very fondly on his university years and describes Heaney as a man who was “incredibly generous with his time”.
Despite having published a series of books throughout his career, Mr. Ormsby says he is still continually striving to achieve ‘poetic perfection’.
“The dilemma every poet is faced with is that you want the piece you are writing to be as close to perfection as possible and you know it won’t ever be perfect. You will always be dissatisfied in some way. It might be in a major way, in which case you roll up the paper and throw it in the nearest bin, or everything work but there is just some little niggling thing about it that you feel isn’t perfect.
“I suppose there is that general ambition that you will produce something that seems memorable to you and memorable to the reader.”
Mr. Ormsby will celebrate his 70th birthday at the end of October.
‘The Darkness of Snow’ is published by Bloodaxe Books and will be available for purchase on Thursday, September 28 on paperback.