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Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

Munster Literature Centre

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JOSEPH WOODS

Joseph Woods is a poet and Director of Poetry Ireland. A winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, his two collections, Sailing to Hokkaido (2001) and Bearings (2005) are both published by Worple Press (UK). He has co edited Our Shared Japan (Dedalus Press, 2007), an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry concerning Japan and is currently working toward a third collection.

Tree-hugging

There’ll come a season when you’ll stretch

Black boards to cover me

– J M Synge

Somewhere in the murmur of the fourth

decade, at the end of the dining room

leaning upright against a bookcase;

the lid bearing his name and dates,

that moment when the blank beyond

the dash of birth gets engraved.

Admiring the grain, but resisting

the temptation to run my hand

over the craftsmanship,

instead, drifting to the wood

that will one day encase, the standing tree

that in the end will fall for us.

A species of oak perhaps in keeping

with tradition and how many more

growth rings for a man of over forty.

In whose earth are its roots extending?

©2009 Joseph Woods

Author Links

Woods at Worple Press

Irish Writers Online bio

'All in a Doo-Da... Pablo Neruda': Woods article at Poetry Ireland

Woods at Wikipedia

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