'Hughes is interested in discrepancies . . . the gap he is concerned with is the one between reality and fantasy, between the world we live in and the one we invent and inhabit in secret . . . intriguing . . . a promising talent . . . able to illuminate the significance of a story without heavy-handedness.'
                                                                             — Clair Wills, TLS
The poems in Negotiations with the Chill Wind are guided dreams — concerned with nothing more than the magical familiarity and strangeness of where and how we choose to live. John Hughes locates in a geography of oceans, forests, cities and townlands a world which is never what it seems — somewhere which is as terrifying as it is exhilarating.