Irish poet Joseph Woods' first two collections of poems, Sailing to Hokkaido (2001) 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."