Adam Hughes's fifth poetry collection, Pluck, dramatizes the faith crisis that surrounded his departure from both Christian ministry and his second marriage.
"Certainty was my birthright," Hughes writes; "I emerged from the womb with my hands clasped in prayer.... To question was to doubt and to doubt was to sin and sin led to hell." Loss of conviction was seismic, ending his vocation as a pastor and alienating his family ("My parents worry... [t]hat I've become an apostate"). His raw, confessional poems of faith and doubt move from despair to self-deprecation and back. "One failed marriage is fine. After two, people begin to wonder," he jests. Medical concerns--Type 1 diabetes and long Covid--only compounded his woes.
Hughes alternates between stanzas and prose paragraphs. The table of contents designates the 64 poems by their first lines in brackets, like the song titles in a hymnal. The collection opens with "A Praise Chorus" and there is indeed melancholic music to much of what follows. Often, the speaker directly addresses God as "you," echoing the biblical Book of Job through plangent cries: "God, if I give you these/ bones will you make/ them into whistles?/ Flutes?... / Must I be broken/ down in order to sing?"
Alliteration, repetition, and wordplay create rhythm and intensity. The metaphors glisten: "the uterine/ darkness of morning"; "tonight I am/ a paraphrase/ of myself."
Readers will find catharsis rather than closure in this bruising, beautiful work: "It was in the wrestling that certainty gave way to clarity." --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck