Abstract
In “The Journey,” a sonnet prologue to Holy Land, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s first-person plural speaker “we” admits to being “warned about the weather” before setting out on a journey but stalwartly concludes, “We braved wind, hard rain./And when the weather was bad, we sang.” From the start of this collection, readers are invited to travel together to holy lands, each sacred place illuminated by a lyric poem—a “song” that helps sustain us in both foreign and familiar landscapes. The Afterword to the collection articulates what is clear throughout: For this poet, “all places are holy places; all land is Holy Land,” and indeed the reader is persuaded of this conviction by poems whose purview ranges from pilgrimage sites in the actual Holy Land, where tiny fish may have nipped at Christ’s ankles (“Ichthys in the Jordan”), to landscapes sacralized by human suffering, as in a heartbreaking scene at the US/Mexican border where “Face down in the river lies a father./His arms around his little daughter.”
The collection begins with a section called “Christ Sightings,” inspired, as we learn in the Afterword, by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where O’Donnell had a vivid experience of the presence of Christ as she took a morning run along the Sea of Galilee, which she captures in “The Storm Chaser.” These “sightings” recur at well-known places along the pilgrim’s route—at the Tomb of Lazarus, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Western Wall—but also “back home” in Baltimore or New York. O’Donnell captures moments of radiant connection with the living Christ, as in “Via Dolorosa” where she places her hand in a hollowed-out spot in a wall along that route where Jesus himself was said to have leaned and rested. She writes:
But in this place I felt our hands touch. The space was just the span of my five fingers. Nothing can convince me now he was not there, that Magdalene’s unruly hair was not soothed by that healing hand, that he was not more than a man.
As here, many of the poems foreground Jesus’s interactions with women—the woman with the hemorrhage, the woman taken in adultery, a mother at the Western Wall. The poems are also almost all sonnets (there is one ghazal, an Arabic form with some likenesses to a sonnet). These sonnets lean into their etymologic ancestry: They are indeed “sonetto”—little songs, as “The Journey” promised. O’Donnell is a master of the sonnet form and uses it extensively in her work. The “little songs” of this section of the book are all recognizable as sonnets by their adherence to the 14-line standard, but they are flexible in meter and rhyme—musical rather than strictly metrical, sonically playful rather than predictable.
The second section of the book “Crossing Ireland” finds the speaker in quite a different “foreign” land—the ancestral “holy” land of her husband’s family where she is clearly not of the same heritage. At a pub, someone teases, “Italian—or Jew—what’s the difference?”, and she herself feels “not at home,” but by the end of this section, as she boards the return flight, she must confess: “I don’t belong./I could make myself a life there.” As a poet, she is at home in the land of Heaney, Yeats, and Hopkins (who though not Irish, died there), and the work of these masters threads her own. Her “traitorous poet’s ear” borrows the lilt of the Irish language as well as the fluidity of the forms of her poetic guides.
In the next three sections, “Ancestral Lands,” “Sounding the Days,” and “Literary Islands,” the holy lands the poet explores are the figurative landscapes of memory and family lore, of imagination and desire, and of poetic inheritance and inspiration. The sonnet resurfaces as a favorite form here, well-suited to the dreamy, almost otherworldly realms the poet wanders and the meditative tone that many of these poems strike. This is a poet “stilled” rather than traveling, and some of the poems bear dates that alert us to their composition during the pandemic. With O’Donnell we have time to trace the history of relationships, revisit the past, commune with the natural world, read, think, and grieve.
A final section “Border Songs” is a “Mercy of Triolets”—15 of these short forms, replete with repetition, creating a rosary-like meditation on the human tragedy that continues to be enacted at the US/Mexico border. The speakers of these poems are like the psalmist; they sit by the river and weep. They are immigrant voices from detention centers, and roadsides, as well as the voices of cruel border guards and concerned US citizens. Although the poems were written in 2019, they feel sadly fresh and provide a fitting conclusion to the collection. Coming after the poems of memory and meditation—the interior and personal landscapes we may have been confined to during the pandemic—these triolets call readers forth again to sympathetic engagement with the world. As the Epilogue sonnet “One Story” reminds us, “There are only two stories: a person goes/on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” Until death, we are all leading this “double life” of coming and going, and therefore called to sing together, especially when the weather is bad. Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s collection Holy Land conducts our steps and our hearts toward that essential harmonizing.