Go into Every Corner and Hunt the Pain You Feel Down

Go Into Every Corner and Hunt the Pain You Feel Down is a collection personified by emblematic poems rich in aesthetic thrusts and contoured slipstreams of language. Hughes elasticizes perspectives, charging them with oblique strategies which guide the reader to listen attentively to words like birds do for worms. His sanguine and glib asides pebbledash streams of consciousness are intertwined with dexterous metaphors that shake, rattle, and roll. No Hughes collection would be complete without lewd language redolent with counterpoint punching, poking, and teasing. Inevitably, bars and the characters and incidents encountered in them are once again sources of gallows humour. People are Putty or Gaffa tape in a big sick cake where 'wankers work at their own despair', their 'heads sunken couches', death sticking to them like fly paper'. Symbolic grey areas, lines, no man's lands, boundaries, sentinels and thresholds act as instinctive anchors. The poems are hinges and bridges that hunt for meaning amongst the urban and rural shadows. Mr. Wazzo has his orchard for an orchestra. The fjords bellow with a symphony of sails. The rush hour, a job interview, a fountain, a high diver, and Formula One racing all come under Hughes' provocative and restless gaze.