Sailing by Ravens

Hughes uses every aspect of the sea—navigation, map making, sailing – to chart her poetry. Hers is a record of Alaska’s fish industry and the strong hearts that steer it. Yet, the book is about vulnerability at sea—with all the remote sensing which that entails; and, how the work of living its boundaries and their challenges justifies our inner discoveries. Washington Independent Review of Books

An immersion into nautical language and life, and an exploration of what it means to live with direction and drift, two opposing energies that tug our human lives. Poetry Northwest

Hughes’s gift to us is a poet’s interior map taken from her experience as a navigator, plus extensive reading about the sea. According to Rilke, art must bear witness to a great solitude, and Hughes reveals the compass points of a searching heart plunged into a solitude whose terms are nothing less than to agree to being lost, to drift, and, as in the title, to learn to trust the instincts of birds. To accompany Hughes’s reveries is to experience a venturing soul whose arrival replicates the fearful exuberance of freedom; her discovery is that without such freedom, we cannot delineate the boundaries of our inner survival maps. Tess Gallagher, author of Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems

In Sailing by Ravens the language of navigation, horizons, and knots begins not as metaphorical flourish but from a literal, deeply realized seagoing life. Holly Hughes has found all her compass points in mapping this world with great intelligence, compassion, and meaning. Nancy Lord, former Alaska Writer Laureate

It’s a rare pleasure to come upon a book so well crafted, so unified in theme, so honest and true to a poet’s heart. Sailing by Ravens is a remarkable voyage. Book passage as soon as you can. The Raven Chronicles

'Hughes has worked these poems into a cycle that begins and ends on inward looking notes, but that ranges widely in the pages between, exploring navigation and life on the high seas as an essential aspect of the human experience. Collectively, the individual pieces manage to convey both the enormity of the planet and the universe beyond which setting sail opens one up to, while capturing the stiflingly claustrophobic feel of being in a tiny craft alone on the ocean. . . . This is a remarkably well composed, tightly written collection of brief poems that open up worlds.' Daily New-Miner