Description

[CARNIVAL MASKS, 2014]

Carnival Masks is Seán Lysaght’s first collection of new poems since The Mouth of a River (2007). It begins in the now familiar place of that book and follows a calendar of revered attention, its eye and ear in tune to the open spaces of North Mayo. Here, in vivid, signature poems, are skylarks in January, winds in March and April, the arrival of swallows and ‘a squall at the mountain’s heart’ in late August. Along with translations from Goethe and Rilke, the book pivots on a sequence of epigrams opening onto the new light of the French Riviera and Tuscany. These shimmering poems – and Seán Lysaght’s most opulent book – traverse Europe itself to embrace ‘the fabulous, inexhaustible/ line of the wide Mediterranean’.