Description
For over twenty years, Seán Lysaght has kept a journal recording wildlife, weather, landscape and the outdoor life in his adopted county.
Unveiling the Sun is a compilation of entries into a single calendar year, from the precious crucible of January’s winter light, through the idyll of midsummer, to the keen focus of shortening autumn days.
As in his earlier books, Eagle Country and Wild Nephin, Seán celebrates the seashores, bogs and forests of north-west Mayo as well as the living world in his own locality near Westport.
The whole builds up to what Robert Macfarlane has called a ‘topography of the self’, where, as Seán puts it, ‘A cherished landscape becomes a realm of potential not only for what it adds to general knowledge, but for what it reveals in ourselves.’
Seán Lysaght is a poet and prose writer who has been living near Westport for over thirty years. Originally from Limerick, he taught for many years at the Castlebar Campus of GMIT (now ATU).
Gallery Press have published seven collections of his poems and translations, including The Mouth of a River (2007), Carnival Masks (2014), New Leaf (2022) and Selected Poems (2010). He has been hailed by Thomas McCarthy, in Dublin Review of Books, as ‘one of the most accomplished and established voices of his poetic generation.’
Praise for WILD NEPHIN :
‘What a stunning book.’ Gerald Dawe
‘In Wild Nephin, Seán Lysaght confirms his role as gifted chronicler, bard and Sherpa of the new wilderness in the making.’
Michael Viney Irish Times
‘What Nan Shepherd has done for the Cairngorms, Seán Lysaght is now doing for the remote expanses of Wild Nephin with this beautiful book.’
Manchán Magan
‘Seán Lysaght’s sensitive and compelling prose adds height to the hills, depth to the bog and breadth to the human experience. It is his finest work yet.’
Michael Kingdon The Mayo News
‘Wild Nephin is nature-writing at its most fervent. His lyrical writing captures the wildness and overwhelming wintry isolation of the blanket bog.’
Patrick Duffy Dublin Review of Books