Item 11 - Vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1993) of Oxford Poetry

Seán Lysaght was born in 1957 and grew up in Limerick. He was educated at UCD, where he received a BA and an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. He spent several years in Switzerland and Germany before returning to Ireland to teach and pursue further studies at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. In 1996, he received a PhD for his biographical study of Irish natural historian Robert Lloyd Praeger, which was published two years later by the Four Courts Press as Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist. He now lives in Westport and lectures at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology.

Lysaght’s early ventures into poetry won acknowledgment in 1975 at the North Cork Writers’ Festival in Doneraile, where he received first prize in the under 18 category with his poems 'The Geese', 'Sacrilege' and 'They Cast off Youth'. He also won an award at the annual Patrick Kavanagh poetry festival in 1985. Lysaght’s first collection of poems, Noah’s Irish Ark, was published in 1989 by the Dedalus Press. His second collection, The Clare Island Survey (Gallery, 1991) was nominated for The Irish Times/ Aer Lingus poetry award. In 2007, Lysaght received the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. His work draws heavily on the natural world, combined with allusions to literature and legend. According to Lysaght, ‘poetry should be a negotiation between what we know to be our limits and the revelation of something we didn’t even realise was there in the first place.’