New Leaf by Seán Lysaght Reviewed

There is less playfulness in Sean Lysaght’s seventh collection, but more beautifully-honed explorations of the natural world, in particular the unique landscape of his part of Mayo, which is the quarter north of Westport and south of Bangor Erris. Each poem offers an exquisite meditation on the integral connection between man and his environment -the opener, ‘Bog Song’, exhibits Lysaght’ s gift for fine imagery and deft control of line:

I walked the hills in spider line
to spin a web of me.
Light crept across the south
and twigs became a tree

. . . Lysaght pays the same degree of attention to the human world, for example the maiden aunt ‘who approached / those dazzling heaps of white / as she crossed a field to the well’ (‘May’); or the man who ‘tossed his head / like a man in a plague of midges / to get the demon out’ (‘A Problem’). Everything receives close attention for what it might yield. Even the confines of his garden on a ‘Wet Sunday’ are sources of beauty:

I lay listening to timber-
limbs creaking at dusk, and fell asleep
with bats weaving the threads
of another cloak, as soft as darkness

. . . Lysaght’s use of language is anything but arbitrary, and his always inventive arrangements of words keeps the reader coming back for more.

Read the full review in Poetry Ireland Review #144