Some 60 years after the publication of Robert Lloyd Praeger's classic naturalist travelogue, The Way that I Went, poet Sean Lysaght published Robert Lloyd Praeger - the Life of a Naturalist, the first biography of one of the pioneering figures of Irish natural history. Lysaght came to Praeger (18651953) relatively late. In fact, it was not until he was living in Germany and feeling . . . not exactly homesick but increasingly aware of his native country, that he first read The Way that I Went. He had long been aware of Praeger's presence - "my father is very interested in wild flowers, he always had a copy of The Botanist in Ireland and The Way that I Went at home and had often mentioned him, so it was a name I certainly knew".
Lysaght's interest in the natural world developed early. As a boy, one of two brothers growing up in Limerick, the wildlife drawn to the banks of the Shannon alerted him to the pleasures of bird-watching and fishing "for eels at high tide, and salmon and trout at low tide, and you'd also catch the odd perch and I've even caught a pike". Indeed, Lysaght's enthusiasm for David Attenborough's magnificently photographed series, The Birds of the World, is such that this interview almost did not take place as we began rewatching it on video.
Now 41, Lysaght teaches at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology at Castlebar, Co Mayo. The campus is situated in a refurbished wing of St Mary's Psychiatric Hospital and the college has already established a definite identity. It has a busy, confident atmosphere. Lysaght is course co-ordinator of Heritage Studies; the programme is deliberately multidisciplinary and succeeds in retrieving the traditional sense of what a university can offer: a complete education.
First appointed in 1994, as lecturer in general studies, Lysaght was teaching everything from business French to communications via German and literature. "It was exciting but sometimes I didn't know what language I was supposed to be speaking."
During that first year, staff were invited to devise new courses to suit the Castlebar setting. "Within that time I first planted the seeds of heritage studies," he says now. Lysaght recalls discovering the idea when reading the work of the Welsh geographer Estyn Evans (1905-89), who had made a multi-perspectived art out of the study of Ireland.
"My colleague, geographer Dr Catherine Kelly pushed the project on further and developed the diploma in rural heritage." Last month approval was given for a further, fourth, degree year. There are currently 68 students on the diploma programme.
A compact figure with an unexpectedly courtly ease of manner somewhat in conflict with his intensely cerebral response to life, Lysaght the academic has not completely lost touch with his boyish self. He enjoys pointing out that his office was formerly used as a lock up. It is a tiny space and imagining what it must have been like for a patient is a sobering experience. A desk and book shelves leave scant floor-space and Lysaght admits it can be claustrophic at times. "Obviously I'm reminded of what it may have been like for the former inmates here - it is a bit like the opening pages of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum."
There are relatively few books in the office. Aside from the limited accommodation, there is also a deliberate sense that objects are kept to a minimum. Lysaght's father had an antiquarian and second-hand book business and many surplus volumes were stored at the family home: Lysaght recalls often turning over in his bed to be faced with a wall covered in books. The image is an oppressive one, of books virtually colonising the living space. "It left me feeling I had to find my own books." The ones he keeps are those he really wants and he has turned increasingly to libraries as a source for books he wants to read yet does not feel obliged to own.
On leaving school he began studying arts at UCC but transferred to UCD after his first year. After a degree in English and French, he completed an MA in Anglo-Irish literature, which included writing a thesis on Francis Stuart. Initially drawn to Stuart because of his outsider status, Lysaght notes - "but no one can remain an outsider for ever. When the poet of Derek Walcott's Omeros meets Homer late in the poem, they start talking about women. Homer says: `Love is good, but the love of your own people is greater.' "
The aside is characteristic of Lysaght's conversation. Literary reference and memory linger as he discusses texts moving from Patrick Chamoiseau's Texas - which he believes offers a blueprint for the understanding of colonialism in Ireland as much as in Chamoiseau's native Martinique - to Henry James's Portrait Of A Lady.
Walcott and Ted Hughes are among his favourite poets, as is Seamus Heaney, an obvious influence on his poetry. When working in Germany on the poems which would become his evocative sequence of nature poems, The Clare Island Survey (1991), Lysaght began each day's writing by first reading from Heaney's Wintering Out.
His regard for Heaney is immense, yet this did not prevent him taking the older poet to task for a comment made in the Preoccupations collection, in which Heaney chides Praeger for a passage in which the naturalist is dismissive of the Tyrone countryside, pronouncing it devoid of topographical interest. Complaining that Praeger's eye is regulated by "the laws of aesthetics, by the disciplines of physical geography", Heaney contends that Praeger is untouched by "the primary laws of our nature, the laws of feeling". No one who has read Praeger could accept this reading of him and Lysaght duly went into battle in a 1989 essay.
The magic of Praeger is that this engineer by training, who was born a few months after Yeats and was a self-taught botanist, epitomised the spirit of the 19th-century man of learning, yet his work remains topical. Through his fine study, Lysaght looks to the work as a way of understanding the man and never intrudes on the individual. "He was a private man: his life was his work. I think he is unique because he never became a personality the way public people are expected to now."
By working on Stuart, Lysaght also developed his interest in Germany and German literature. A Swiss Government scholarship led him to Geneva in 1980 to study under George Steiner, who he reveres as a visionary aware of how important it is for literature to be able to cross linguistic borders. Ironically, the lectures Steiner delivered at that time focused on Wordsworth and Coleridge. But Lysaght was already committed to European literature, particularly Grass, and recalls the excitement of discovering the Danzig novels. His time in Switzerland was not particularly happy, however. "I did a lot of bird-watching and I think it saved me from turning to the bottle or worse."
In 1984 he returned to Dublin. During that time he was writing some of the poems which would feature in Noah's Irish Ark, a collection published when he was living in Germany, teaching English.
"So even the naturalist turns mythologist," writes Lysaght in an early poem from the collection: In the Burren. His nature-poetry captures the mythic sense of nature. In Yew, from the Wood Runes sequence, this most ancient of trees announces: "I'm an evergreen/deathdealer. . . no cattle browse/ my graves. . . When I die,/who'll mourn me? I've outlived all my contemporaries,/the slave of great longevity."
Lysaght's first months in Germany were spent as a night porter. Looking back on his Stuttgart years, he says: "I was always disappointed that my Germany was never the one I found in Grass." In 1990, he returned to Ireland and spent four years teaching at Maynooth while also working on a doctorate about Praeger which would become the biography. During that time he also wrote the essay, Contrasting Natures: The Issue of Names which appears in Nature in Ireland (1997).
The Way that I Went remains special to Lysaght. "Praeger took as his subject the natural world and managed to rise above the very narrow preoccupations of the Ireland of his time - considering that it was published in the same year as De Valera's constitution." Aware that the literature of natural history in Ireland was long established as a Protestant tradition, Lysaght remarks: "If you take the subtitle, `an Irish man in Ireland', it is obvious Praeger had to assert his identity at a time when Irish identity was being monopolised by Catholic nationalism."
Croagh Patrick dominates the view from the Westport house in which Lysaght and his wife, Jessica, are currently living as they prepare to build their own home. Again, there are few books - mainly poetry and natural history, John McGahern, whose work he teaches and admires, and Chaucer. There have been many physical moves, and as a poet he has moved from being an observer to a tentative narrator figure, as in Scarecrow (1998). The ruling motif gradually becomes an extension of self. He admits he found the progression from watcher to subject difficult. "The poems I am working on now are more autobiographical and I'm also drawing on Mayo folklore."
Sean Lysaght discusses his biography of Praeger in Waterstone's, Dawson Street, this evening at 6.30 p.m.; his Robert Lloyd Praeger - the Life of a Naturalist is published by Four Courts, price £25
