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Ocean Letters

Ocean Letters

9781906614423
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In this third collection of his poems, Joseph Woods again returns to the theme of travel, at once deepening and expanding the concerns of his earlier work. He also explores the meaning of return and homecoming, of being abroad in one's own place and of seeing the familiar from a new perspective.

Childhood memories and experiences are renewed and refreshed, the past and the future echoing each other, from the child in the opening poem 'imagining myself in some ship’s open hold / while Morse code drifted in from the kitchen' to the closing poem where an old man on 'a wet lane of fuchsia-laden hedges / on the damp island of Chiloé' might have 'stravaged out / of my country decades ago'.

Joseph Woods was born in Drogheda in 1966. He studied biology and chemistry and, latterly, poetry, holds an MA in Poetry, and has worked as a chemist, a teacher and as director of studies in a language school. Since 2001, he has been director of Poetry Ireland. Widely travelled, he has lived in Japan and Asia. For his first book Sailing to Hokkaido (2001), he received the Patrick Kavanagh Award. This was followed by Bearings in 2005. In 2010 Dedalus Press reissued these two books in a single volume entitled Cargo. He co-edited Our Shared Japan (Dedalus, 2007), an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry relating to that country.