The Rain Barrel

Frank Ormsby’s enchanting new volume, The Rain Barrel, allows us to see with eyes still wet from the Creation. He is a local fire-god with a tongue of flowers. His sense of the folkloric and country life in general is self-assured and true, but he also writes with flair and insight on such subjects as art and artists. He has mastered the Haiku, the erotic poem, and, throughout his storied career, the wistful but unsentimental elegy: The whole season has come to this: / a holding on so that the letting go / might seem to us like chance. The title sequence ties these themes together in a meditation on the object, its uses and symbols, until in the last poem of the sequence he reflects on how like the barrel we are, fulfilling our roles as we deteriorate beyond repair.