Room Twelve

Morocco, a place of ragged, ravenous, and cruel heat mirages, where the wind shapes the sand into knives, serves as the setting for this poetic reportage to the North African country. Hughes has created an mosaic of travelogue poems that prowl, reach, and cool. His intent is to be an emissary, or a casbah companion, sparring with the scratched ugliness of the medina's charade, as the sky rains down with a bundles of money attitude that preys on tourists. The language cuts the twilight's murky what-if riddles of the watcher and the watched, imbuing nightfall with timeless engravings. Hercules may be chained to a rock in a cave, his haemoglobin broiling in his eyes; the beggar with stumps for arms and legs, be medievally destitute, but the poems are there, exerting and untangling. For Hughes, a deserted night club's leaves may seem like fallen bats, a swimming pool at sunrise be tranquilly redolent with cobalt or a human face bubbling with large dilated eyes. 'nose-diving, waterproof sun making the perfect plunging arc, navigating slowly past the ponderous saline grave, heading for a rendezvous with darkness, the terminus of solitude, with a passport of dejection and reprisals.' Extract from Railway Station: a Penchant, Passport, Platform, No Reason The poems are rattling trains, their humming lines tempered by the world's diurnal cycles. If you choose to journey past the door of Room Twelve, you will find confetti sunshine playing on the lyric sheet of the mind, and the timbre of memories ripe with zestful urgency. More