Simple Pleasures

Rating:
Summary: Carolyn & Keely Howser Rescue & Preserve the Past
Review: Simple Pleasures, a new book of poetry, by mother-daughter tandem, Carolyn and Keely Howser (a high school junior), is a marvelous example of the democratization of poetry. In fact, right off hand, I cannot think of another venture exactly like it. Simple Pleasures is a handsome volume, a shimmering black cover with white type, simple, yet seductive--just like what's inside. The poems range widely in subject: skinny-dipping, quilting, the births and deaths of loved ones, drinking tequila. The Howsers draw an easy-to-follow map of the pedestrian as well as the earth-shattering. More than anything the book seems a dialogue between mother and daughter: the mother with her decided wisdom and command of the past, much of what the daughter realizes only through the stories she hears:

The years have long gone since Mama passed away
and longer still since Grandma passed away,
but the work of their hands keeps us warm at night.
Though Keely never met her,
she has a gift from her Great Grandma,
saved by her Grandma, and finished by her Mama.
Maybe it will see her children
or her children's children one day,
perhaps accompanied by a story or two about the
women who created and rescued it. ("Gift from Grandma")

But the daughter, too, develops her own precocious insight and weaves what she hears into her own song:

Yet here I am with this one memory that
could be you.
You became lost in a world of closed minds
and ignorance;
forever banned from the one you love and
the child you created.
I am so sorry, but I do remember you. (From "Alberto")

Indeed, the poems in Simple Pleasures are not only an act of creation, but perhaps more importantly an act of rescue. Carolyn and Keely Howser remarkably rescue and preserve the past by making it not only accessible to each other, but to all of us.
(Review published in various journals and media. Joseph Bathanti teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University, and is the author of This Metal, and East Liberty).