Lysaght, Seán. Spenser. Mayo: Stonechat Editions, 2011. 121 pp. ISBN: 978-0956891815. £14.50.      

As Andrew Hadfield’s great tome takes its place on the sagging bookshelves of Spenserians, note should be taken of a slimmer volume, a poem by the Irish poet Seán Lysaght entitled simply Spenser.  It too is the story of the poet’s life, from beginning to end, and it too tries to make sense of how the secretary, husband, and father we know from the historical record might have come to write The Faerie Queene.  The poem is composed in tercets, with lines of four or five beats and between eight and fourteen syllables, and it runs to 118 pages; its rhyme scheme is cagey, using the three-line clusters to hint at the nine-line Spenserian stanza, with alternating off-rhymes coming and going, and every now and then a couplet.  The diction can be very plain, sometimes to the point of flatness: “Afterwards, Raleigh said he was delighted / With Spenser’s ability to shape a dark conceit” (90).  Sometimes it is more pointed: “He saw how sophisticated violence could / Spread the Renaissance among illiterate bands” (97).  There are moments of lyricism (a fish “Twisting silver on the hook of a gaff” [76]); unexpected mythographic excurses (as when Calliope chooses Spenser as her favorite, leaving Gabriel Harvey to become Gabriel Harvey); and scraps of Spenserian domesticity (“‘Edmund? Are you still writing? Won’t you come / Back for supper? You’re overdoing it again’” [103]).  Does a portrait emerge of the poet, or an explanation of the poetry?  No, but there is something thought-provoking about what we do get, a Spenser who always wants to be back at his writing, reluctant to set down his pen even at the birth of his second son, a man who does not trouble himself too far to understand either the Irish or his wife. Lysaght does not know Spenser well, but suggests that there was something unknowable about him, and that what he knew, he knew only through his own poem.

Jeff Dolven is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University and Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities.