Great Regulars: This week, Frank Ormsby's "Fireflies"

is a poem to brighten our darkness as "the year's midnight" of the winter solstice approaches (22 December in the modern calendar). It's the title piece from the poet's 2009 collection published by Carcanet under their Oxford Poets imprint. The first part of this fine collection focuses on "an area of New York state" to which Ormsby has been a regular visitor over the years, and the second is concerned with his Enniskillen childhood and Belfast-based adult life. But poems, of course, are not in thrall to borders, and this opening "American" poem seems to extend the energies of the fireflies' "antic spark" in many outer and inner directions.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Poem of the week: Fireflies by Frank Ormsby

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While English fog, snow and wartime austerity accompany Katherine's day and night of reckoning, [Philip] Larkin, as he traces her numbed desolation, is surely remembering the miserable alien place Germany had been for him when he was dragged there as a reluctant teenager.

If Katherine is German-Jewish it surely heightens her predicament, sharpens her characterisation and extends the entire range and depth of the novel, upgrading it to, if not a major masterpiece, then certainly a minor one.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Winter reads: A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin

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