Carnival Masks by Seán Lysaght (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Carnival Masks by Seán Lysaght Eamonn Wall Seán Lysaght, Carnival Masks. Loughcrew, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 2014. $11.85 (paper); $18.50 (cloth). To a large degree, the Irish view of time, or how Irish people like to imagine time, is a short road defined by history and invasion. Though ancient history, Carrowmore and Newgrange for example, are acknowledged parts of the cultural and historical landscapes, both are dwarfed by what is more recent and what would appear more relevant to contemporary life: St. Patrick, Vikings, Normans, Tudors, and various conflicts and rebellions convey the true weight of history for many. The Irish voice, whether in prose, poetry, music, song, or image, would seem to give artistic and creative life to this view of time: time and voice are working in tandem. Recently, Ireland’s writers—among whom Seán Lysaght can be rated as one of the most gifted—have challenged this prevailing view. Like Tim Robinson, another West of Ireland writer, Lysaght sees time as being longer and deeper than how it is invented in the Irish context. Writing in Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986), Robinson notes that “cosmologists now say that Time began ten or fifteen thousand million years ago” and Robinson’s attachment to this deep time underlines his work. One reason for attaching ourselves closely to a narrow concept of time is the sense that our own lives will appear more resonant and important if the timeline is narrowed from St. Patrick to the present: some Irish writers, guided by science and ecology, seek to separate us from these fallacies. In taking this longer view, Lysaght and Robinson force us to reconsider our relationship to the Irish past and to accept how relative our own importance is: the four hundred year span from the Flight of the Earls to the present counts as but a brief moment in the history of the world. In Carnival Masks, his superb new collection of poetry, Lysaght forcibly brings home not just his deep sense of time, but also the knowledge that human rhythms and life practices pale when compared to other forms of living life such as the seasonal return to Ireland of swallows: until the swallows showed up, that is,winging it low, always switching the game.The place they wanted back was this drive, thisvery porch where they swept in [End Page 154] to chatter over the nests at last year’s doorand start again by confounding every metaphor. Unlike humans, swallows do not claim to own acreages and buildings; rather, they assert a right to use them for periods of time and they do not wish to develop landscape but, instead, seek to quietly renew it by their labors and songs. Their seasonal visitations ask of people to accept their presence as being natural and of nature. What makes the world interesting, moving, and meaningful, we might take from reading Carnival Masks, is the totality of living forms that define this space, and not just what humans have imagined or created. In common with other poets writing in this vein, Lysaght reminds his readers that swallows, for example, do not need humans—for all of our intelligence and power—because they have been doing fine for thousands of years without us, and how we imagine swallows does not improve on the real thing. They are their own reality. In Lysaght’s work, swallows do not merely exist on the periphery of poetry as ornament but are central figures given voice: he breaks down hierarchies to show, as J. Scott Bryson has written in Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002), “the interdependent nature of the natural world,” a view of things, as Seamus Heaney pointed out, that played a vital role in the early Christian period but which was, subsequently, erased to a large degree. Though Lysaght writes in an ecopoetical vein, his work is devoid of ideology: in delicately crafted lyrics, he shows much and tells little or, as Flaubert has said so eloquently, he is everywhere present but nowhere visible. One illustration of interdependence is to be found “Red Deal,” a majestic short poem: Now I’m the...