It is a curious fact, muses Frank Ormsby, that Queen's does not occur by name in any of the poems in The Blackbird's Nest, subtitled "an anthology of poetry from Queen's University Belfast".

Whereas, "Lavery's does - four or five times." Lavery's is a pub, a student haunt at the bottom of University Road.

Lavery's, aka the Gin Palace, features strikingly in Green Gown, Paul Muldoon's bowsily erudite love and witty poem, the title taken from the garment sported by Lecherie in Edmund Spenser's 16th-century romantic epic, The Faerie Queen. The poet is attempting to impress a woman, and feels he rises in her estimation when "when shot/after shot had rung out from Divis Flats/and I kept right on drinking my glass of Heineken/in the public bar of Lavery's."

Ormsby, who edited the anthology, is reflecting on this because I said it was a pity there are no poems by Padraic Fiacc, who unforgettably wrote of the Queen's part of town in 1973: "Our Paris part of Belfast has decapitated lamp posts now." Fiacc held court in the York Hotel, and was often to be met walking, or in the bookshops, the area's unofficial writer in residence. However, he didn't go to Queen's as a student, nor did he work there.

"I couldn't have found a reason to smuggle him in," says Ormsby. Mind you, one poet who is included, Joseph Campbell, worked as a security guard at Queen's, so the criteria are interpreted broadly.

Phillip Larkin came to Queens as a "sub-librarian" in 1950 and left for Hull in 1955. He is represented in The Blackbird's Nest by two poems which are both about standing outside of institutions, looking in. Church Going is a meditation on the decline of religious practice. It ends with the reflection that churches will "never be obsolete" since "someone will forever be surprising/A hunger in himself to be more serious."

Reasons for Attendance has the poet watching young couples in a dancehall, moving "solemnly on the beat of happiness". He will not go in: "What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell/(art if you like) . . . "

John Hewitt wrote sternly in 1945 that Queen's had remained "culturally a foreign oasis to us" and that its literary groups had "produced little work of significance". According to Ormsby, this was accurate.

"Hewitt, Roy McFadden, Robert Greacen and WR Rodgers circled around the Northman magazine in the 1940s," he says. Hewitt's enigmatic The King's Horses is in the anthology, a poem suffused with longing for something mysterious and powerful, glimpsed once.

THERE IS ROOM in this slim volume for a maximum of two poems per poet. Ormsby, a teacher for 36 years, is a distinguished editor, with the Honest Ulsterman periodical and landmark books such as Hewitt's Collected Poems, Poets from the North of Ireland and A Rage for Order-Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles behind him. How did he manage to choose from the extensive works of poets as good as, for example, Larkin, Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon?

He thoroughly enjoyed the process. "One of the luxuries in editing this book was I didn't have to be canonical," he says. "It would be a showcase. It allowed me to choose poems I like a lot. I've already had people asking me why I chose to represent Heaney with A Sofa in the Forties." He laughs. "An element of shameless indulgence? Or Seamus indulgence perhaps." He waves mock-manically as I write this down: "No! No! No!"

Heaney has written about being at Queen's in the early 1960s, when "a lot of young people of a vaguely literary bent were islanded about the place." Larkin had just left, but Heaney never heard his name mentioned. Hewitt, infamously, had been snubbed and sent to Coventry for his failure to conform within the North's narrow cultural politics.

According to Heaney, change came in the mid 1960s with the arrival of Phillip Hobsbaum, the English academic who "gave a generation a sense of themselves" with "the Group", in which young writers read and discussed their poetry. Stewart Parker, on the other hand, said the Group made him "allergic to contemporary poetry". Hobsbaum wrote himself, badly, and Ormsby has included two of his poems. Girl Reporter has a distinct whiff of misogyny about it. "You aren't the first person to say that," says Ormsby, uneasily. "It is of its time, let us say."

Perhaps not coincidentally, there aren't many poems by women from this period in the anthology, but that changes in the later years. There is the lovely Prayer for Northern Ireland by the English poet, Carol Rumens, along with her appealing and funny Stealing the Genre, about the failed seduction of another woman. "I'd asked her to bed. And she'd come to bed. End of story./Only it wasn't the story I'd wanted to tell."

Rumens was writer in residence at Queen's from 1991-1994.

"When I first edited Poets from the North of Ireland in 1979, there were no local women who had published a collection. By the second edition in 1990, Medbh McGuckian had made her name, and then through the 1990s women began to publish," says Ormsby.

McGuckian is here, along with younger women such as Sinead Morrissey and Leontia Flynn, who has won the Whitbread award. "There's a very strong group of poets coming along now," says Ormsby. He mentions Flynn, along with Nick Laird, Alan Gillis and Colette Brice.

There's a great poem about poetry and love and war by Cathal Ó Searcaigh in the anthology. An old row about all that flared up again this summer in the letters pages of The Irish Times after Danny Morrison castigated Irish poets for failing to come to the "defence of the oppressed" by showing solidarity with the IRA prisoners on hunger strike in the Maze in 1981. He is explicitly scathing about Heaney. Morrison claims the poets "simply sat on or sniped from the fence" and quotes Bobby Sands; "The Men of Art have lost their heart,/They dream within their dreams./Their magic sold for price of gold/Amidst a people's screams."

Speaking to The Irish Times, Morrison admits he "had a wee dig" at Heaney in the introduction, and recalls meeting the poet on the Enterprise train between Belfast and Dublin some time during the Hunger Strikes. "I asked him to do something and he told me about the poem he was working on which became Station Island. I also gave him and asked him to look at Bobby Sands's poems. I was looking for an endorsement or imprimatur, but he didn't come across for me. He wasn't exactly disparaging, but he said they were derivative of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol."

ORMSBY REJECTS THE idea that poets can be harnessed to a cause. "Since the 1960s a lot of poets from here have written outstandingly good poems about the Troubles. They are exploratory, rather than propagandistic." Among such poems, and included in The Blackbird's Nest, Michael Longley's Ceasefire is outstanding. The poem, about forgiveness and reconciliation, was first published in The Irish Times just after the IRA's 1994 ceasefire. Longley has an honorary degree from Queens, and, while literature officer at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, helped to fund many great readings at the University. His wife is the poetry critic and professor, Edna Longley. "We owe a lot to the Longleys," says Ormsby.

Ciaran Carson's fine poem Belfast Confetti, about language and riots, is in the book. Carson is the director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, set up in 2003. The blackbird, a reference back to the first mention of Belfast in Irish poetry, in the ninth century, is the centre's emblem and gives the anthology its name. (Ormsby says his working title was The Blackbird Has Landed.)

Carson brings us back to Lavery's. "When I came in 1967 there was an aura - it was exciting and vibrant - you met other individuals who were into poetry and philosophy and ideas and you could go to pubs and talk. There was a network, from Lavery's to the Eg and the Bot and the Welly. When I started here in the centre, I wanted to recreate that aura - events and then you hit the pub."

Queen's had a bad reputation during the Troubles for hiring "safe" - and sometimes second-rate - English academics, rather than hiring potentially troublesome local ones. "It was seen as an ivory tower," says Carson. "I'm hoping the centre will be more engaged with the outside world. Our events are open to everyone."

Belfast isn't always receptive to poetic types, of course. A couple of years ago, back from Florence where he'd been reading from his translation of Dante's Inferno, Carson was walking past the Waterworks in the north of the city.

"In Florence, homeplace of Eugenio Montale, I'd been hailed as 'il professore'," he says, with a self-deprecating smile. "Back home, this crowd of youths shouted after me: 'speccy c*nt'."

The Blackbird's Nest, published by Blackstaff Press, is launched in the Whitla Hall at 8pm on Nov 4. Readers at the Belfast Festival event will include Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian and Leontia Flynn. Regrettably, Seamus Heaney is unable to take part due to illness