Pluck
What’s left when certainty begins to erode? That’s the question haunting Adam Hughes’s poetry collection Pluck, and it’s not rhetorical. Hughes, like so many of us, says he once held certainty in both hands. A pastor for many years, he inhabited spaces where belief was not personal but vocational, communal, and structural—spaces where certainty is often assumed.
Pluck moves between poetry and prose, exploring the far side of certainty as Hughes traces what happens when the beliefs that once held us together begin to dissolve. This mixture and juxtaposition of forms mirrors Hughes’s experience losing a sense of certainty: Some moments require the compression of lyric language; others spill into reflection. In one prose passage he writes, “What is left when certainty erodes? I once held all of my beliefs in one hand, my future in the other. I stand now with empty hands after a lifetime of grasping.” The image is stark but recognizable. Many readers—religious or not—will recognize that moment when the frameworks that once made life legible no longer seem sufficient.
One poem opens with a deceptively ordinary memory: learning to tie shoes. “Of all the things I’ve ever accomplished,” Hughes writes, “perhaps the greatest / has been learning to tie my shoes.” The act of tying shoes becomes a metaphor for the things we learn in order to survive: habits, beliefs, disciplines holding us together. But the poem turns when Hughes tells us, “When I buy a new pair now / I tie them once and never again / slipping them onto—no, cramming / my foot into their soft insides.” Our most useful skills, like tying shoes, can become protective shells that bar us from engaging with the world honestly—cramming our feet into the soft insides of our soles. Another poet might stop here, but Hughes turns the poem again to show us the other side: “Sometimes the things we learn / are a shell, a refuge, a stillness . . . only half- / filled and then only / of reticence.” That moment of realization represents a collapse of certainty, and it reminds us that our rituals—or perhaps the certainty underlying our rituals—have the power to prevent us from living honestly, but they also protect us.
