In his review of Selected Poems (2010) James Harpur celebrated the ‘sensitivity and insight’ of Seán Lysaght’s work, the ‘sense of a pact with nature, of a spell remaining unbroken’.

Carnival Masks continues on from Seán Lysaght’s The Mouth of a River (2007) and 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.