Holy Land: Poems

Holy Land: Poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Paraclete Press, 2022; 112 pp., $20

Winner of the 2021 Paraclete Poetry Prize, Holy Land: Poems might be the most personal, probing collection yet for poet, scholar, and Fordham University professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. Divided into six sections, each one self-contained but enriching the other parts, the collection showcases O’Donnell’s mastery of formal poetry, especially the sonnet, her nearly embodied grasp of the authors she admires and teaches, and her dedicated exploration of Catholic principles as she experiences them in the real world.

The first section, “Christ Sightings,” contains poems, many of which were written during a recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The grouping is held together by moments in which the poet claims that she saw Christ. The section begins “Running along the Sea of Galilee/ I see you in your boat, tall brown/ man that you are” (“The Storm Chaser,” 14). This is a bold assertion, much like the Catholic insistence of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. In making this claim, she becomes not merely a pilgrim but an (everyday) mystic. At the West Bank in Palestine, she references the Fisher King of tradition and addresses Jesus, “that moment you were sure/ who you were…” (“Ichthys at the Jordan,” 17), one of many instances of the poet’s capacity for prayerful intimacy. Similarly, “Easter Monday” imagines a prosaic scenario in which Christ comes to visit her, concluding, “I ask him if this time he plans to stay” (26).

The second shorter ten-poem section, “Crossing Ireland,” has a narrow geographical focus but ranges widely in form and tone. Seamus Heaney, Hopkins, Irish saints, Irish husbands, and memorable Irish characters people these poems, not to mention the stark Irish landscape. Here she sees “the dark-ringed eyes of the haunted / whose hunger can know no end” (“County Kerry,” 33), but here she also spars with her “Celtic Virgil,” “who wouldn’t take no for an answer: / Heaney was a hack, Donegal men dishonest” (“Tigh Mholly,” 34-35). This section stands out, however, as she explores the idea of otherness, that no matter how Irish she feels in her heart and sensibilities, she is perceived as foreign. The section concludes with: “I don’t belong. / I could make my self a life there” (“On Leaving Eire,” 42).

“Ancestral Lands,” the third section, is a suite of retrospective autobiographical poems, ranging from her childhood experiences and ancestral heritage, right through current family weddings, births and celebrations. In “The Land of Dreams,” the poet dreams words delivered by a baby boy which encapsulate her own credo and the underlying vision of the entire book: “Everything’s a blessing & all is holy / lisped the vatic infant under the sink” (57). No matter how celebratory the events, loss inevitably accompanies them. Several poems stand out: her mother’s death in the sonnet “The Land of Last Things,” followed by “Tell Me,” a Persephone song to a lost mother; “The Land of Daughterhood” about the loss of her father and “the mess you made with our mother, / us being the mess” (50), and the stark line, “My brother is in the hospital, again” from “The Land of Resilience” (51).

“Sounding the Days” is a series of lyrical meditations, concerned with both the public and private, all the while effectively attesting to life being larger than it appears on the surface. The section opens with a sonnet, occasioned by a child calling a half moon, broken, “Terre et Lune” (64): “There are days / when the world seems ruined beyond repair,” but yet we have “the moon…/ the world’s blessed and broken communion host.” Horatian nostalgia, for sure, but she also gleefully shares her experience of “The Land of All Souls,” when “they are here with us at the breakfast table / sitting in our chairs, buttering their toast” (68).  Likewise, her conversation with Saint Lucy, “a visitation I had not planned” (“St. Lucy’s Fire,” 70). There is a plea to work for a better, kinder world: “Tired of dying, tired of hating, / let’s try loving our neighbor for a change” (“Awaiting Grace,” 69) and poems recognizing her own mortality: “I can’t stanch the wound. Word by word I bleed” (“The Land of Forgetting,” 74).

In “Literary Islands,” another short focused section, the poet filters her experience in conversation with beloved literary figures who have journeyed before, from Sinatra to Melville, and beyond. She begins with “the outrage of being dead” (80) in “Conjure,” an homage to W. H. Auden.  She commiserates with Flannery, “And still you wanted more” (85) in “Flannery’s Last Day.” Her words echo her heroes’ in “Glasnevin Graveyard:” “beyond this brief burning / refined past reckoning” (88); the stones, berries, and regret in the terrible-ish sonnet, “The Days When Only Rilke Will Do” (89); and the Swiftian “Land of Lickwidge,” “I glabbed you by the glumpus. I blist your flup” (90). These are erudite, sensitive poems, made fun and accessible in the hands of a gifted poet.

The final section, “Border Songs,” is a powerful departure from the earlier sections, a series of fifteen triolets taken from bits in the news about the United States–Mexico border crisis in the spring of 2019. Dramatic and poignant, if they weren’t so true, they might seem melodramatic: “They confiscate your rosary when you come. / I cannot go to sleep without one” (94). If there are Christ-sightings here amid the cruelty, the poet does not find them.

Holy Land: Poems showcases O’Donnell’s poetic range and the extent to which she has deeply deliberated her Catholic faith and worked as a witness to incarnated evidence through her poetry. Early on, she attests to her fixed faith: “… Nothing can / convince me now he was not there” (“Via Dolorosa,” 20). Her faith is not often challenged in these pages but life and the world pain her, at times. This book looks to the old and new, the light and dark, small and large mercies and similar cruelties. In the end, as in the beginning, the Prologue poem (“The Journey,” 11) affirms: “We braved wild wind, hard rain / And when the weather was bad, we sang.”