PETER HUGHES was born in Oxford in 1956. After attending local state schools he did stints at Cheltenham Art College, Anglia Polytechnic and Stirling University. He has worked as a teacher and translator, among other things, in the UK and in Italy. He lives on the Norfolk coast. Of "Behoven", the final sequence in this collection, Peter Riley comments that it is "probably the most sustained and chiming thing he has done, goes further, into an elegiac depth without ever relinquishing the verbal wit we expect of him.