Cirrus@Austlit

'This collection of poems by Nick Hughes is diverse and inspiring. The poems range from powerful social insights to intense personal explorations to light-hearted tilts at the great and not so great in society. Many of the poems were written and first read to the Mount Lofty Rangers walking group as Nick Hughes explored the beautiful Adelaide Hills with them. And so, there are poems that sing with the joys and delights of nature. There are many sonnets in the collection and these poems display a developing enchantment and fascination with the form. The combination of lyrical musicality and rhythmic symmetry is by turns surprising and bewitching. Nick Hughes skilfully wrestles both personal subjects and wider social issues into the constraints of the sonnet and makes them flow naturally. Some of the later sonnets are deliberately regular, allowing the metre and rhyme to amplify the meanings. Many of the poems are deeply personal and revealing but that is the point of poetry: to express meanings in ways that reverberate within the hearts and minds of others; to find words whose beauty and truth can resonate in human souls. Not every poem in this collection does that of course – some of them just seek to make the reader chuckle a bit – but the variety and range of the collection is very entertaining.' (Publication summary)