By Joseph Woods

Cargo

Joseph Woods’ first two collections of poems, Sailing to Hokkaido (2001), and Bearings (2005), issued in a single volume.

Description

Drogheda-born poet Joseph Woods’ first two collections of poems, Sailing to Hokkaido (2001), for which he received the Patrick Kavanagh Award, and Bearings (2005), both originally published in the UK, have been unavailable now for some time. In advance of the publication of his third collection in 2011, Dedalus Press publishes in a single volume the poems from those first two titles, making them available to a new and wider readership.

“A poet with the whole world in his hip-pocket”, is how James J McAuley has described him, and Woods is certainly among the most widely travelled of the younger generation of Irish poets, resulting in poems of detached, lucid observation that yet go far beneath the surfaces and situations which prompt them, whether on the far side of the world “Where the word for beautiful is clean”, as the title of one poem has it, or closer to home where the complex history of an Irish Big House or a sequence of small holdings on a nondescript roadside may provide the opportunity for an “airing of dark interiors”.


ISBN 9781906614379 Paperback
140 x 216 mm, 120 pp
2010

Additional information

Weight .15 kg
Dimensions 216 × 140 mm

Product Detail

  • ISBN: : 9781906614379
  • Size: : 216 x 140 mm
  • Pages: : 120 pp
  • Published: : October 2010

About The Author

Author

JOSEPH WOODS was born in Drogheda in 1966. He now lives with his wife and daughter in Harare, Zimbabwe where he works as an independent writer. Woods’ peregrinations have involved extensive travels in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa; he has also lived in Kyoto, Japan and more recently in Yangon, Myanmar. After initial studies in biology and chemistry, Woods eventually took an MA in Poetry and subsequently became Poetry Ireland’s longest serving director until 2013 when he emigrated. Joseph Woods’ first collection, Sailing to Hokkaido (Worple Press, 2001) was awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and Bearings (Worple Press, 2005) followed. Dedalus Press reissued Woods' first two poetry collections in one volume entitled Cargo (2010), and have published his poetry since. Woods’ third collection Ocean Letters (Dedalus Press, 2011) when translated into Hungarian by Tomas Kabdebó, was awarded the Irodalmi Jelen Prize in 2013. The critically acclaimed Monsoon Diary (Dedalus Press, 2018), Woods’ fourth collection, was based in part on his experience of living in Burma. Woods has edited numerous poetry publications, including Our Shared Japan (Dedalus Press, 2007) co-edited with Irene de Angelis; an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry concerning Japan with an accompanying essay by Seamus Heaney. With Gerard Smyth he co-edited The Poetry Project, a web anthology of visual artists and filmmakers interpreting selected poems. Woods is consulting editor to the poetry journal Cyphers and has edited anthologies of Burmese and Zimbabwean poetry for the journal. In 2014 and 2019, Woods was a recipient of the Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship, and in 2016 and 2020, he was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary. In Zimbabwe, Woods has edited a history of the Irish in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe and is working on a life of Burmese chronicler, Maurice Collis. He frequently contributes to radio, newspapers and journals. “A poet with the whole world in his hip-pocket.” — James J McAuley