Eric Ormsby, born in Atlanta in 1941, is a poet and scholar. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. Presently, he lives and writes in London, where he is Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. He has written six poetry collections, including Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990) (which won a Quebec prize for the best poetry of that year) For a Modest God: New & Selected Poems (1997), and Time's Covenant (2006). His poems have been published in various journals and magazines such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review and anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He has also written widely on Islamic ideas, including Theodicy in Islamic Thought (Princeton University Press, 1984).
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Reviews
[Ormsby's] poems afford the rare pleasure of listening to a polished yet deeply humane sensibility respond, in language of exhilarating verve, to whatever it seizes on or despairs of. --New Criterion