Mouth of a river

“We laughed at the absurdity of the teeming downpour and slapped endlessly at the crowds of midges that swarmed to form an inescapable blight”

Country sights and sounds
John Shelley

The day was well suited for staying put, with prison bars slanting from low cloud to drum at the windows and pattern the ground; there would be no escape this morning, either. The trout would be safe for another day, with the rill where they feed no longer singing but in full cry, with the swollen river charging along its course, big in a small place, until it pours through its own narrow estuary to feed the tide. That tide, the greedy ocean, sucking at the gorged breasts of the land; they would be suckled dry if it were not for days such as this, days that will keep the bogs flush-full and the streams full and free of debris. Besides, when the flood has drawn back from the brim of the bank, that will be the time to cast a fly to those silver-scaled travellers coming home to rest.
The postman hunched his way through the rain and attempted to thrust a small parcel through the letterbox, but it would not fit. I took it in through the window and clawed at its damp skin to find a slim volume inside. It isn’t often that I sit and read through an entire anthology of poetry, but this time I did, despite finding myself turning back the pages repeatedly to find one or other phrase that had retrospectively drawn tight long after I had passed it by.
‘The Mouth of a River’ is the latest collection of poems by Westport-based Limerick exile Sean Lysaght. But this is not so much a book of verse as one of history, folklore and legend, a too-brief testimony to a dying age; though we might not mourn the story of a simple, unassuming people languishing in what was, at times, a fight for their very lives, neither should we forget. The bulk of this little gem of a book is based in the remnant wilderness of the north Mayo blanket-bog scape. Formerly at least semi-fertile and densely forested, this area is at once forbiddingly insular and extrovert to an extreme.
As I read I found myself identifying first with places and then with characters. Is it so long ago that I walked the flat basin of what has become the Ballycroy National Park to climb its rim of hills above the Bangor Trail? I did so even with the author himself, and as I first perused, then read and reread, I saw once more the “starved ribs” that mark the toil of Lazy Beds and the “web of fields and abandoned walls in the valley’s upper reaches” (A Discovery) and fell to wondering where had I been in the days since then.
And when I came to ‘The O____’, the centrepiece and mainstay of Lysaght’s work, the stock that holds the graft of man and beast, I instantly knew the “stream that leaks from a gully on a remote mountainside”. After all, had I not rested there, on that very same “hag that overlooks the place” and climbed the single oak that grows there too, and seen that “old crows nest built from fallen fingers of a tree”? It was so, and in weather worse than this, on a day that we laughed at the absurdity of the teeming downpour and slapped endlessly at the crowds of midges that swarmed to form an inescapable blight, horrible in its immensity and terrible in its bloody intent. And so I laughed again at the few lines of ‘A Midge Charm’:  “Rain God – ruin their gathering veil,” writes Lysaght.
On that same day we defied the torment of those bloodthirsty hordes and cast dark-bodied flies into an even darker and seemingly hopeless flood to pick, as if by magic, silver threads of sea trout from the ever-brown fabric of that landscape. We were there by choice; others had previously been born into the place. Few are now. The modern world has seen to that, with even rural folk reformed into urbanity.
Gone with the old people are the old ways. Caved-in homes become no more than landmarks, the once-worked fields lie abandoned to an encroaching wall of rushes, left to the stone-eyed hill sheep and the interminable midges. The combination of my own experience in this wild place and sympathy for those whose lot it was to live here has me feeling lost. Lysaght somehow knows. ‘Everything’s organic here…including the typhus. And so was the blight when it came.’
To catch the essence of another’s place in another’s time is no easy task. ‘The Mouth of a River’ does more. For me, it changes this day’s rain from a reason to stay in to a more compelling one: a reason to go out.