Make No Mistake — Colin Hughes
ISBN: 9781788648646
£9.99
Make No Mistake threads connections between the human and the natural world in a quest for clarity at the borders of what we know and see. In poems prepared to ‘look up’ with an acute gaze that sees ‘a hawk / stealth away from the wood’s edge’, Hughes admits the limits of ‘what we could safely speak’ – yet affirms that even in a ‘burning city’ or ‘galactic cold’ you may ‘let only your heart decide’.
Make No Mistake presents poems that are deeply felt and finely wrought. Through a dexterous range of forms, they hold a particular and inviting music. Here is writing as honest excavation, sharp-eyed as the fine gathering of birds in its pages. These are true poems, enquiring and feeling into the dearest things of the world, poems of nature — encounter and observation, of family, and always of love. Arriving clear through all these inevitable complications and complexities they ‘burn to ask’.
Matt Howard
These poems feel driven by an urge to define their world. Hard-hitting and lyrical, precisely metaphysical, clear-cut yet elusive, maybe confessional, their pied-piper voice leads you on. Eye-catching images flash past: a sunset-tinged lover, or a wagtail that whisks itself ‘into a scrap of wrapping / then scrunches back into shape’ as it bathes.
Fiona Moore
Colin Hughes was a journalist and editor on The Times, The Independent and The Guardian before running Collins Learning (HarperCollins), and then AQA, the exam board. He chaired the University of Middlesex, the University of Staffordshire and then the board of Ordnance Survey. He is a trustee of The Rialto poetry magazine, co-author of Labour Rebuilt: The New Model Party (Fourth Estate 1990) and editor of What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? (The Guardian 2010). Having lived most of his adult life in north London, he now runs, sails, walks and watches birds around his home on the north Suffolk coast.