Ocean Letters

In this third collection of his poems, Irish poet Joseph Woods again returns to the theme of travel, at once deepening and expanding the concerns of his earlier work, while 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".