Unveiling the Sun

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: A Mayo Journal is a compilation of these 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 (Little Toller Books, 2018) and Wild Nephin (Stonechat Editions, 2020), 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 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.’ His biography of the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger was published by Four Courts Press in 1998.