Display Review

Day-Old Child and other Celebrations of Motherhood

By Carol Lynn Pearson

Reviewed by Delsa Anderson
On 8/5/2002

Gibbs Smith (Layton, Utah), 2001.
32 pages.
ISBN: 1-58685-072-5
Suggested retail price: $9.95 (US) Awards: Traci O'Very Covey

The best way to read Carol Lynn Pearson's new book is aloud, so youwill more surely notice her sly rhymes and the rhythm of her style.When you read silently, as my granddaughter once said, explaining thespeed which is so much faster than reading aloud: "There's this thingyou do with your eyes!" However, that same speed can enable CarolLynn's nuanced phrases and tricky, sometimes Ogden Nash-like rhymes toelude you. For instance, in her poem Diapering at 4:00 a.m., noticethe placement of stratagem and 4:00 a.m.

He created the heavens and the earth
And the seas, and the naked, needing
Infants crying to be held.
He thought it all up
This clever stratagem.

And yet-
I'll bet he smiled
When he thought about diapering at 4:00 A.M.

Carol Lynn is quirky, and takes us unaware with a sudden knowledgethat she has slipped in another rhyme. But where is it? What word,or group of words, in this case, did she use to get past our guard?Her rhymes are never where you expect them to be.

I liked Mother to Child, especially the first phrase.

Look --
Your little fist fits mine
Like the pit in a plum.

.& .& .&

I'm your mother, true,
But in the end
Merely an older equal
Doing her faltering best
For a dear, small friend.

In The Ninth Month, she speaks to her unborn baby.

Being a duplex
I have been happy, my dear,
To loan you half the house
Rent-free and furnished
As best I could.

You have been a good
Tenant, all in all
Quiet, yet comfortably there
Tapping friendly on the wall.

.& .& .&

But we will keep in touch.
There are bonds, my dear,
That reach beyond a block
Or a mile or a hemisphere
Born of much love and labor.

I approve the move
And gladly turn from landlady
To neighbor.

The illustration is delightful, showing the mother's torso as a housewith a small locked cottage attached, and mother just unlocking thedoor.

The illustrations deserve attention, as there is one to illustratealmost every poem, and they are an integral part of the book. Firstyou notice the ovals. Although I tired of the salmon-and-pink colorscheme; the illustrations by Traci O'Very Covey were sometimes veryclever, sometimes mundane, but always egg-inspired. Even the straightlines were curvy. Motherhood was the theme -- the ovum thescheme. Mother, baby, downtown skyline, megaphone-all straight linescurved. Pearson and Covey have collaborated before, in Fuzzy RedBathrobe.

Day-Old Child has probably been read aloud more than any other ofCarol Lynn's poems since the year her first book of poetry came out.It's a favorite in Relief Society, Mother's Day Programs, and thehome. It's the lead poem in this book; it's also the title. As youreread it, then continue with the collection, you can see the changefrom the conventional every-other-line rhyming system to her present,seemingly haphazard placement of offbeat rhymes. I don't think thispoet is ever haphazard. The poems that would seem to be so "easy towrite" have a singular warm charm and denouements that catch thereader off guard.

This is a very small gift book, so the price seems heavy: $9.95 plus7% tax = $10.25, divided by 8 ounces (which includes the dust cover)comes to $1.25 per ounce. The new mother or the old mother whoreceives this book will probably cherish every ounce, if she's aPearson fan. Count me in that group. Somewhere, in almost everypoem, she manages to surprise me.

Target audience: Mothers of any age, Pearson fans; gift buyers formothers.