Praise for The Evening Sky:

“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 Hughes’s life as an attorney, of complexities in his relationship with his father, and of the devotion so evident in his long marriage. Hughes’s 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 Peláez Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor of The Christian Century and author of What Cannot Be Fixed

“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. However, also throughout these supremely crafted poems, there is abiding love for and faith in this life and this world—but as the speaker tells us in ‘Doxology at Sixty-Six’: ‘Earth’s pain grinds on (we’re past being misled).’”
—Stephen Gibson, author of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize

“Charles Hughes’s fine new book, The Evening Sky, is rich in thoughtful, well-written poems that claim our attention, not by extravagant gestures but by speaking to us openly and honestly about the nature of our time and place. I find it difficult to write a better, more accurate description of this book than Hughes himself has done, in a poem about a widowed professor who every year now teaches Camus’ La Peste, and who responds to the threat of despair with the recognition that ‘…the book’s deep themes / Are human love and hope /And how these things endure / Amid death’s ravages— / Or may.’ The poem ends fittingly with the words, ‘It matters what he says.’ So it does.”
—Charles Martin, author of Future Perfect and Signs & Wonders

“The freshness and force of Charles Hughes’s descriptions—of Midwestern landscapes, of people known deeply or seen in passing—are equaled by his masterly control of prosody, resulting in poems that are made to last. A sensitivity both to things of this world and things of the spirit, a compassionate shrewdness, is present throughout this collection. The gracefully maintained balance here of thought and feeling should ensure that readers who first encounter the work with admiration will return to it with renewed pleasure.”
—Robert B. Shaw, author of A Late Spring, and After and Blank Verse

From reviews of Cave Art:

“[Hughes’s] poems are clear and vibrant jewels. . . . All of these poems breathe empathy and love, more so than any collection I’ve read in recent years.”
—Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, The Christian Century

“Hughes seeks the beauty that radiates, almost imperceptibly, from our daily sufferings and disappointments and failures . . . . Cave Art . . . I hope is just the first example of his success.”
—Michial Farmer, The Englewood Review of Books

“. . . deep in these metrical and unconscious recesses of things, Hughes reveals his perceptivity and power as a poet.”
—James Matthew Wilson, The Weekly Standard