Fresh Water Pearls The Collected Poems of Pearl Merriman Howerton -The Current River Poet - Softcover

Compiled By Bonnie Risby

9781948901253: Fresh Water Pearls The Collected Poems of Pearl Merriman Howerton -The Current River Poet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948901250 ISBN 13: 9781948901253

Publisher: Acclaim Press, Inc., 2019

Often referred to as the Poet Laureate of Ripley County, the Current River Poet, Poet of the Ozarks, and Poetess of the Hills, Pearl Howerton spent most of her nearly ninety-five years living in and around Doniphan, Missouri. Receiving little formal education, Pearl was a voracious reader steeped in the oral traditions and musical legacy of her forebears. Inspired by the people, events and beauty around her, she overcame this lack of formal education through her acquaintance to literature and songs.

Composing verses her entire life, Pearl was legally blind by the time she created the majority of her poems and relied on relatives and friends to transcribe dozens of stanzas stored in her creative mind. Throughout her life, many of her poems were published in the Prospect News and other regional magazines and journals.

In Fresh Water Pearls, Bonnie Risby Pearl's granddaughter has compiled nearly 150 of her favorite poems, preserving the legacy of the Current River Poet for decades to come.

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About the Author:

Bonnie Risby grew up on several acres of Illinois woodland atop the bluffs across the Mississippi from St. Louis. These woods were her playground where she and her siblings camped out, played detective, scouted animals, hunted morels, learned to shoot, gardened and enjoyed the beauty of the outdoors in every season.

The Gibson's, a transplanted family following WWII, always felt they had a foot in two different states. With grandparents and extended family still living in Ripley County, Missouri, Bonnie and her family visited the Doniphan area several times a year, spending holidays or school vacations and enjoying tubing, fishing, gigging, johnboat picnics, and family fish fries. Long before modern highways, these southbound journeys seemed much longer and each produced unique adventures involving detours, ice storms, carsickness, exasperated parents, and near-death car dilemmas.

After the birth of a new generation, pilgrimages to Ripley County continued, although a bit modernized. Sons, daughters, nieces and nephews of the original transplants continued to wander back to Current River to visit family including many returning from afar after retirement.

Now third and fourth generations make an annual migration to their ancestral base to tend graves, visit relatives, and frolic along the Current's crystal shoals, creating new memories (despite sunburn and chigger bites) and communing with the past and with nature.

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