Robert B. Shaw describes Hughes’ new collection as showing a sensitivity both to things of this world and things of the spirit, a compassionate shrewdness, and Stephen Gibson, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, says this knockout collection is one to return to again and again-here, individual ambition and personal failure intersect with the literary and historical: as Lear misunderstands love for what it isn’t, so a father fails family in not understanding self; although My Lai occurs far away-and far back in time-it still haunts memory even in a suburb.

These poems touch the spirit, love driving all of the narratives-of growing up in the 1960’s, of baseball and fishing, of encounters in his life as an attorney, of complexities in his relationship with his father, and of the devotion so evident in his long marriage. Hughes’ aesthetic is anchored in the sacramental, his poems words made flesh, visible signs of inward grace. Somehow he does all of this in poems carefully wrought and perfectly crafted.

-Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, poetry editor of The Christian Century and author of What Cannot Be Fixed