Life
1962- ; b. Belfast, ed., St Patrick’s High School, Downpatrick, Co. Down, and QUB, English BA, works in US; published collection, The Something in Particular (Gallery Press 1986); Negotiations with the Chill Wind (Gallery [q.d.]); The Devil Himself (Gallery 1996), containing 34 short poems: Fast Forward (Lagan Press 2003). ORM
[ top ]
Works
‘New Poems’, “Drowing in the Dead Sea”; “Weather Magic”; “The Shaking Bog”; “The Sarbanbarjudas”; “The Bishops of Clogher”; in Fortnight 331 (Sept. 1994); note highly anti-clerical ‘The Bishops of Clogher; port. and notice from Ciaran Carson, remarking that Hughes’s work ‘examines how fiction becomes history ... entertaining fictions, stories, yarns which bear a sidelong, sly reference to the real world; lies told as if they are the truth.’
[ top ]
Commentary
Mark Roper, ‘Language and Myth’, review of Ciaran Carson, Opera et Cetera and The Devil Himself (both Gallery 1996); cites poems focused on nightmare aspect of the North; cites lines, ‘the shadow of a shadow of a shadow’; ‘At the thought of resurrection/And the inevitable light’ (‘Metaphysics of Light’); ‘determined to pass through the Cumberland Gap/in the company of the scum of the earth’ (‘The Emigrant’); other titles in a collection of 34, devoted to nightmare aspect of the North [with] its subjection to religion, power, superstition, vilence, myth’ [Roper]; cited incl. ‘Tyrone Gothic’ and ‘The Bishops of Clogher’.
[ top ]