Description

[SELECTED POEMS, 2010]

Seán Lysaght’s retelling of the tradition that has it that Achilles reached Achill is emblematic of the range of this watchful poet’s concerns. His field-trips in the west of Ireland, following the footsteps of pioneering naturalists, resulted in exact, distinctive early poems that refracted a local focus through broader perspectives. Alert to the exertions of human presence he repeatedly pays tribute
to the splendours of Ireland’s natural habitats. Seán Lysaght’s Selected Poems draws on the work of more than twenty years and five collections. 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’.