SWEET ADELINE

Brunker celebrates his mother’s poems about family and faith in this debut memoir.

For almost 40 years, Brunker’s mother, Adeline, wrote poetry at her kitchen table in between performing household duties. Collecting and promoting his mother’s “kitchen poetry” became the author’s “bucket list” ambition as a way of sharing her unique perspective on life. Brunker opens with brief background information about how his ancestors came to settle in Knob Noster, Missouri, and how Adeline lived essentially as an orphan given the death of her mother in childbirth and an absent father. After WWII, Adeline married fellow orphan Gilbert Brunker and settled down to start a family. In a poem addressed to Gilbert, Adeline writes: “There is something extra nice in all you do for me. / In many, many ways you have let me be so free.” Adeline continued to write until her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Her poetry is stylistically simple, written in quatrains following either an abab or aabb rhyme scheme. Several of her poems express a strong Christian faith, and others are introspective and deeply moving, such as “Happiness,” a lament about her children leaving the nest: “The beauty of music is no longer. / I am engulfed with loneliness. / The fear of each day is growing stronger / You are a stranger to me, dear happiness.” However, Brunker’s commentary quite often proves unnecessary: “The unhappiness she was experiencing was the taunt of loneliness.” The author gives a strong sense of the environment and events that inspired his mother’s poems, but exact dates and names are often omitted, which can be confusing. For instance, Brunker writes, “The husband she picked was also an orphan abandoned by his father at an early age,” but he does not introduce or mention Gilbert’s name. The author also tends to make sweeping generalizations: “Women are drawn to an infant and want to hold them.” Adeline’s poetry steals the show, but despite its simple charm, it may not be of interest to a wide audience.

Uncomplicated, heartfelt poetry with intermittently helpful commentary.