This sporting life

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.