Eric Ormsby R.I.P.

Marius Kociejowski has written to tell me the poet, critic, translator, Islamic scholar and voluptuary of sound Eric Ormsby has died, apparently in Prague, at age eighty-five. As always when a good writer dies, our impulse is to honor him by reading his work. 

In 2012, I reviewed his collection The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems (Carcanet) and wrote:

 

“Born in Georgia in 1941 and raised in Florida, his career has been unusually scholarly and cosmopolitan, qualities that distinguish his verse yet never make it stuffy. He lived for decades in Montreal, serving as director of University Libraries and professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. Now he is professor and chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. His previous books include Theodicy in Islamic Thought and Moses Maimonides and His Time, and Ormsby has earned a reputation as a discerning critic and reviewer in England and North America. He shares the bookish bent of those other librarian-poets, Borges and Larkin.”