Carnival Masks is Seán Lysaght’s first collection of new poems since The Mouth of a River (2007). It begins in the now familiar place of that book and follows a calendar of reverend attention, its eye and ear in tune to the open spaces of North Mayo. Here, in vivid, signature poems, are skylarks in January, winds in March and April, the arrival of swallows and ‘a squall at the mountain's heart’ in late August. Here, too, is a run of sonnets engaging with Spenser and a handful of resplendent translations of Goethe and Rilke. Carnival Masks pivots on a sequence of Venetian epigrams that open into the new light and erotic world of the French Riviera, Tuscan land- and seascapes and an olive grove in autumn. These shimmering poems — and Seán Lysaght's most opulent book — traverse Europe itself to embrace and report ‘the fabulous, inexhaustible / line of the wide Mediterranean’.
