Powerfully simple words run like a strong tide through the poetry of Cathy Smith Bowers.

The words pick readers up and propel them through her life, her family, her sorrows and joys. Honest words. Plain. Clear images. Meanings lay bare in the lines themselves.

Bowers, poet-in-residence at Queens College, was the subject of the latest Southern literature colloquium at Catawba College.

On Monday night, professors and poets talked about her work. On Wednesday, Bowers came to read her poetry and reveal a little more of herself to people who had already had a glimpse.

She told a story on herself Wednesday, facing the audience. She said she felt kind of like she did when she was a child, when she told her mother, “Mama, I want to be fameless.”

“Well,” she said Wednesday, “I feel fameless tonight.”

On Monday, Catawba English professor Janice Fuller presented a paper on Bowers, comparing her own experience as a Southerner with Bowers’. Fuller said so many Southerners work so hard to hide their heritage they divide themselves into two parts — one for home, one for the world.

The home person is emotional, while the world person is cerebral and analytical.

(This follows the theme of the first colloquium, which discussed short stories by Alice Walker and Flannery O’Connor. Both stories looked at dysfunctional families and the gap created by children who wanted to deny their heritage.)

Bowers, proud of her Southern heritage, manages to brag about it and question it gently at the same time.

She celebrates the working class South and the world, the large, sophisticated world, Fuller pointed out, and makes living in the two worlds acceptable.

In her poem, “A Southern Rhetoric,” Bowers pokes fun at, then embraces her mother’s wordy, Southern speech patterns, when the mother says “It’s a sight in this world/ the things in this world/ there are to see.”

Bowers chides her, then turns sentimental in her final lines: “From the little house, the crib/ where she bent each day, naming/ for me the world where words always fail,/ warranting, now and then,/ those few extra syllables,/ some things spoken twice.”

In “Groceries,” Bowers shows her guilt over sneaking off with a boyfriend to a boxcar for the night, then praises him for keeping her impoverished family alive by giving them damaged groceries from the store where he works.

Fuller said Bowers sees herself as cargo and longs to be transformed, as the cloth is at the textile mill, “...whitened, patterned/ into stripes and checks, into still-life gardens ... ”

The boyfriend’s gifts of “damaged goods stolen from the stockroom” are “bandaged/ with masking tape,” symbolizing for Bowers how her dysfunctional family is bound up by this gift of life.

Bowers read both poems on Wednesday in a way that made Fuller’s explanation obvious.

Anthony Abbott of Davidson College, a friend of Bowers’, joined Fuller for Monday’s presentation.

He met her at a writing workshop years ago. He discovered he writes about the South as a Damn Yankee, since he’s a transplant, and she writes about it through her deep roots.

He has no roots, having spent much of his time in boarding schools and moving place to place.

He said Bowers’ overwhelming message is that the family is the strongest and most important unit you will ever belong to.

She comes from a large family, marked by tragedy. One brother, who served in Vietnam, died after a lengthy illness. Another brother died of AIDS. Her father, an abusive alcoholic, disappeared from Bowers’ life for 20 years. One of her sisters is her closest friend.

Many of Bowers’ poems in her latest book, “Traveling in Time of Danger,” explore those relationships, particularly the deaths of her father and brother.

Abbott read three of her poems, “Men,” “Fire” and “The Boxers.”

In “Men,” she writes of her mother’s obsession with Elvis, so great she leaves her father’s supper burning on the stove, so great she takes a train to Memphis.

“When she came back/ I asked where Elvis was/ and she cried for days. ... Father took Mother back/ and never mentioned Elvis./ And mother never burned his food again/ nor sang.”

In “Fire,” Bowers tells how her father once set fire to the closet in her room, “for the insurance money, he told her later.”

Her mother, after intense anger, looks at him as a pathetic figure and treats him as a child.

“But all she did was take him to her breast/ and hold him, shaking her head/ says Edward, Edward.”

Perhaps the most moving poem on Monday was “The Boxers” about Bowers and her sister coming to terms with their father’s death.

After the funeral, Bowers gets a plain brown package of his things. She looks at it for weeks without opening it.

She and her sister have a stiff belt, then open it. “And all that was there were a few plaid flannels,/ the jacket to a leisure suit, and a pair of boxers,/ white and baggy, Rorschached in urine ...”

She’s shocked to discover one day that her sister is wearing the boxers, “whiter, softer now, washed clean ...”

Abbott calls her family “classically Southern.” Her family comes first, despite all she’s seen and done. Abbott said she has never not been with her family for Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving.

The difference, Abbot says, between his poetry and hers, is Cathy Smith Bowers has always known who she was and she writes about it. Abbot has forgotten who he was and must write to discover himself.

Jess McCartney, English department chairman, suggested we are always trying to integrate our past and present. And so many Southerners have lived in extended families, that that becomes an integral part of who they are.

Bowers’ appearance Wednesday highlighted much of Monday’s discussion, as she read some of the same poetry and talked about her life.