Hebweb news 2009: launch of Glyn Hughesí new book Life Class

Launch of Glyn Hughesí new book Life Class

Added Saturday, 10 October 2009

Sunday 18th, 5pm at Linden Mill, Hebden Bridge

“…There seemed no place I’d stop in pursuit of feelings.
But what you know is, in love you’re a different person,
one that you hadn’t guessed you were,
one maybe better or maybe worse, but clearly
there are as many selves to be as there are loves…”

Life Class is an autobiographical poem covering the narrator’s beginnings as a worshipper of nature, later an organic gardener (before this was fashionable), living in cottages on the Pennines, and also some years in Greece. It covers his rural working-class roots and three marriages. The poem is remarkable in its keen eye for the natural world, and accounts of the people and circumstances of his seventy years.

Glyn Hughes’ many awards include the Welsh Arts Council Poets Prize, Guardian Fiction Prize, and being short-listed for the Whitbread, Portico and James Tait Black prizes. Two of his books were selected as classics of nature writing by a poll of Guardian readers and in the Times he was named as “one of the six best ever authors on the north of England”

Life Class by Glyn Hughes

“Why are these poems not among the classics?”
Philip Hobsbaum

“I have not seen this year a book of Selected Poems by a living writer, more quietly memorable, more moving in simple human terms, and displaying a greater range of skills.”
Charles Causley in Guardian Christmas Books

“Hughes’s ability to touch on just the right nuance of feeling, in situations where the slightness of its manifestation bellies its depth, is quite remarkable… It is Glyn Hughes’s achievement not only to have described his terrain with economy and accuracy, but to have expressed the spirit of it with a sensitivity which masterly.”
Contemporary Poets

“It confirms Hughes as one of this country’s most vibrant and
versatile writers.”
The Observer