Vincent Woods is a playwright and poet whose work for theatre includes At The Black Pig's Dyke, Song of The Yellow Bittern and On The Way Out. He worked as a journalist and broadcaster before becoming a full-time writer ten years ago. He adapted Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara for stage and has written two plays for children, The Brown Man and The Donkey Prince.

A radio play, The Leitrim Hotel, won a P. J. O'Connor award and he has also received the Stewart Parker award for drama.

Vincent co-edited The Turning Wave, an anthology of the poetry and song of Irish Australia. Vincent has published two collections of poetry, The Colour Of Language and Lives and Miracles.

Vincent has been writer in residence at NUI Galway and with Mayo County Council.

He is a member of Aosdána

Lives and Miracles is a collection which derives much of its strength from the simplicity of its form. Vincent Woods, through his work as a dramatist and through his intimate knowledge of popular metrical forms (both Irish and Australian), is well placed to sustain a demotic register that is flexible enough to map the changing expectations of Irish life during recent decades. The poems discover a kind of mad delight in the voices they rehearse, and the poems are ironic in a manner that allows the pleasure of the irony to be shared by the voices that speak them. The reader, then, is not privileged, but must catch up with a speaker who is no less knowing and worldly.

Woods is a writer who combines a sideways glance at the material facts of economic life (a rare matter in Irish poetry) with wit. The poems are sardonic and observant, and their edginess is the uncanny discovery within a single phrase of the ordinary and the fabulous, the quotidian biblical event.

I have heard these poems read to large audiences, and it is the certainty of their touch which makes them communicative and resonant. The apparently casual is expertly structured and carefully weighted. The humour is varied, often black, often deeply compassionate, and sometimes deliberately inconsequential.

Lives and Miracles will be an important and influential collection. I am certain that it will discover a wide readership, and will achieve in readers' minds a distinctive place as that rare thing, a sharply crafted collection of poems that is never weighed down by the care taken in its construction. The poems are brilliant and light.