Preston Zeitgeist contains buckets of heart and flourishes of crass gumption. Hughes takes us into the ghostly corners of his mind with an edgy, punk do-it-yourself attitude. Migrating on a journey through a sequence of vandalised spiritual stations and interlocutions, the reader must tap into the macro and dig the microcosm of bastardization.

For Hughes, the bubble in the spirit level of life is like a fist ready to burst with curses, catechisms, and regrets. The writing ploughs through the political and personal, gripped by symbolic social idioms, influenced by the sensuality of Virginia Woolf, the psyche of Henry James, and the absurdities of Chekhov.

'The late openings of the twenty-four-hour conscience
are winking their neon blood in puddles.'
extract from Chekhov

This is early Hughes, segueing the strength to be found in fragility. His ears listen to the corn ripening, confronting the salmon and snakes, the saints, sinners and saviours of politics and science. He surveils the cartography of communication, desirously harvesting from both the urban and natural worlds, loaded with lyrical twists of fate and complicit phraseology.

'The lavish party was over,
the carcass in a parched stream, left to rot,
and there was nothing to feel or feed from there,
save to knock it down, begin again the will to dream.'
extract from Overgrown Greenhouse

His compass is set and reduced to the small mercies of conversations, where gaps in the grift of understanding can act as duplicitous transparencies, starkly exposed like X-rays clarified on the poetic light box of the page.