Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

In 1816, architect and botanist Joseph Woods (1776-1864) embarked on a two-year journey through France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece, documenting interesting flora as well as buildings of note. This two-volume work first appeared in 1828. The account stands apart from other contemporary travelogues owing to the application of Woods' architectural insight. By critically assessing ancient and modern buildings for strengths and defects, Woods hoped to inform fellow architects as to how they might produce beautiful buildings through the study of different modes of construction and decoration. Accordingly, the text is accompanied by Woods' drawings of important buildings and architectural features. In Volume 1, he charts his year-long journey through France and Switzerland to Rome, including discussion of the notable ecclesiastical edifices of Notre Dame and the Vatican.

In 1816, architect and botanist Joseph Woods (1776-1864) embarked on a two-year journey through France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece, documenting interesting flora as well as buildings of note. This two-volume work first appeared in 1828. The account stands apart from other contemporary travelogues owing to the application of Woods' architectural insight. By critically assessing ancient and modern buildings for strengths and defects, Woods hoped to inform fellow architects as to how they might produce beautiful buildings through the study of different modes of construction and decoration. Accordingly, the text is accompanied by Woods' drawings of important buildings and architectural features. In Volume 2, he records his travels through Italy, Greece and Malta, and examines such notable locations as the Athenian Acropolis and the ruins of Pompeii.

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 Chilo " might have "stravaged out / of my country decades ago."

This is a new release of the original 1954 edition.

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."

Given the distance which separates the two countries, it is remarkable the interest contemporary Irish poets take in Japan, both as subject and-responding to its rich literature and culture-as exemplar. To mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1957, Our Shared Japan brings together a large selection of poems by Irish writers (both in English and in Irish) written or published during those 50 years. Featuring some of the best-known names in contemporary Irish poetry, it also includes many younger poets who have grown up with and, in various ways, responded to those growing connections. Some of the poets have visited or spent time in Japan and write from that experience; others respond to a Japan of the imagination, adopting or adapting Japanese poetic tecnnique as a means to expand and enrich their own ways of looking at the world. In this respect, Our Shared Japan is a celebration of outside influence, but it is also a celebration of the power of poetry, wherever we may travel to find it, to bring us to ourselves.