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
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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.’
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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’.
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