The Night Is Young is a lyrical collection of quiet, contemplative poems that seek purposeful communion with ideas of universality. The poetry echoes with glimpses, offerings, and sacraments. The imagery flourishes, then sleepwalks across the page, offering shelter and sanctuary, obliquely charged with a blend of innocence, curiosity, and poise.

‘Fireworks pollinate the night
into fizzing blooms of flowers,
falling petals dying,
in dark velvet greenswards,
seed and souls and flesh
foundering in invisible
places of pronounced gravity.'
Extract from Behind the Scenes

Whether Hughes is laying stone flags, observing red mullet swimming in a harbour, or a poppy field suddenly flayed, he discovers the rich claret of thought in the macrocosm and the microcosm. As the sun takes the stairs to its throne in the sky, absence, escapism, and thought become a heavy, blinking eye, inviting the reader to pick the locks of language, friendship, and society, then breathe in the air where hunger and the foundations of the day unearth where the night is young.