Seán Lysaght
Seán Lysaght, an artist whose poetry is inseparable from his engagement with Ireland’s natural surroundings. Lysaght’s poems abound with alert perceptions of Ireland’s west, where he makes his home — its mountains, bogs, and beaches, its flora, and its birdlife. . . Tonight, we thank our guest for a literary achievement that charts a progressively more comprehensive understanding of what is meant by the word “environment”. His work brings us not just to the natural world, but also to the environment of the imagination, the environment of language, the environment of literature and of the world’s store of legend and tale.
— O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry citation
Seán Lysaght was born in 1957 and grew up in Limerick. He was educated at UCD where he received a BA and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. He subsequently spent several years abroad, in Switzerland and Germany, before teaching for some time at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He lectured at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology until 2015. He lives with his wife Jessica in Westport, County Mayo.
The Gallery Press has published six poetry collections — The Clare Island Survey (1991), Scarecrow (1998), Erris (2002), The Mouth of a River (2007), Venetian Epigrams (2008, translations after Goethe), Selected Poems (2010) and Carnival Masks (2014). His collection, New Leaf, was published in 2022.
His work on the life and writings of Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist was published by Four Courts Press in 1998. His verse narrative of the life of Edmund Spenser was published under his own imprint in 2011 and Eagle Country in 2018.
In 2007 he received the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.
Links
Seán Lysaght Titles
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New Leaf
€12.95 -
Venetian Epigrams
€11.95 – €18.50 -
The Mouth of a River
€11.95 – €18.50 -
Selected Poems
€11.95 – €18.50 -
Scarecrow
€11.95 -
Erris
€11.95 -
Carnival Masks
€11.95
Selected Poems
Selected Poems draws on the work of more than twenty years and five collections. Combining lyric darts and tracts of near-Wordsworthian contemplation, it is a carefully considered distillation of what Edward Larrissy praised in Stand as ‘a poetry of observation, but also of meditation; a poetry where the everyday verges on the visionary’.
Videos
Sean Lysaght reads ‘Catkins’.
Seán Lysaght reads ‘Five Hawks’.
Seán Lysaght reads ‘The Bay of Angels’.