The Evening Sky, by Charles Hughes
The Evening Sky is a new collection of poems by Charles Hughes.
Advanced Praise for The Evening Sky:
The freshness and force of Charles Hughes’s descriptions—of Midwestern landscapes, of people known deeply or seen in passing—are equaled by his masterly control of prosody, resulting in poems that are made to last. A sensitivity both to things of this world and things of the spirit, a compassionate shrewdness, is present throughout this collection. The gracefully maintained balance here of thought and feeling should ensure that readers who first encounter the work with admiration will return to it with renewed pleasure.—Robert B. Shaw, author of A Late Spring, and After and Blank Verse
Charles Hughes’s fine new book, The Evening Sky, is rich in thoughtful, well-written poems that claim our attention not by extravagant gestures but by speaking to us openly and honestly about the nature of our time and place. I find it difficult to write a better, more accurate description of this book than Hughes himself has done, in a poem about a widowed professor who every year now teaches Camus’ La Peste, and who responds to the threat of despair with the recognition that “. . . the book’s deep themes / Are human love and hope / And how these things endure / Amid death's ravages— / Or may.” The poem ends fittingly with the words, “It matters what he says.” So it does.—Charles Martin, author of Future Perfect and Signs & Wonders
