Draft:John Hughes

John Hughes (born 1962 in Belfast, N.Ireland) Irish poet who has published four collections of poetry: The Something in Particular (Gallery Press) 1986, Negotiations with the Chill Wind (Gallery Press) 1991, The Devil Himself (Gallery Press) 1996, Fast Forward (Lagan Press) 2003. His poems deal with the gaps between reality and illusion. They are concerned with the world we invent and inhabit in secret and the tensions that exist in them. His work has been described as witty, laconic and assured. Literally and metaphorically anything can happen in his poems. Hughes is a poet who asks unflinching questions, uses exactlingly honed assertions and precise, shocking images to illuminate dark arenas of public and personal life and their interaction. His poems have a strange and unnerving capacity to present subversive, unanswerable riddles, and direct parables at one and the same time. Hughes is a poet who offers little comfort - his work is lacerating and honest in the way it explores how the personal and social interact in often disturbing fashion. In some ways he has fallen off the radar due to his last book being published in 2003. This is most unfortunate as he is one of the most original poets to have emerged from the North of Ireland over the past 40 years.