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.

Unveiling the Sun: A Mayo Journal, with drawings by Yvonne McDermott