Seán
Lysaght is a poet treasured for his explorations of the discipline
of silence and watching. In Erris, his local focus is refracted
through broader perspectives. His poems adopt a strategy by which
a moment observing the natural landscape becomes a prelude to
meditation while, in a sequence about his native city, a speaker
plays devil's advocate with ideas about the value of tradition
in an Ireland hurrying to forsake it.
An extended narrative dramatizes a move westward, to Connacht,
with all the tensions of that phrase's unsaid counterpart.
As his horses 'knead the brown dough of the ground' and a plane
'pulls its thread across an azure afternoon and lets it fray',
Seán Lysaght infuses his poetry with history, memory and
the joys of discovery in a new frontier.
