Abstract
The impressively unified seventh volume of poetry by Fordham professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell begins to work some of its magic before one even opens it. On the cover we are greeted by a full-bleed reproduction of “Morning Sun,” one of Edward Hopper’s most memorable paintings. Visual stillness is preeminent in the form of a woman in a cell-like room who sits in the middle of a mattress. Dressed only in a pink shift, she clasps her legs and gazes out an open window. In this case, the marketing choice of the Hopper works well to upend the old admonition that one mustn’t judge a book by its cover.
Just as Hopper surrounds his quiescent woman with concise, geometric formality—sharp-angled quadrants of light and shadow with hardly a wandering curve in sight—the contemplative poems in Still Pilgrim fold themselves into the rigors of the sonnet. Thumbing past that Hopper cover, we discover 58 sonnets, each of 14-line length, employing meter and rhythm, and often conforming to patterns of end rhyme.
If O’Donnell’s embrace of the sonnet initially strikes one as a musty undertaking, it may be because the sonnet has been with us in English for 500 years and, even earlier, originated in Sicily in the thirteenth century. One can learn much more about the sonnet’s history in Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form (Ecco, 2017) where he devotes an entire chapter to it. Hass, one of our finest and most erudite living poets, is intrigued at how long-lived the sonnet has proved. After reporting that the Petrarchian arrangement of the 14 lines into an octave-sestet pattern mimics the 8:6 proportions of the features of the human face, he wonders if there might be other compulsions leading poets to the form: “There really isn’t, as far as I know, a good study of whatever it is, formal or psychological, that has made the form—in all the European languages—so persistent and compelling” (183).
For O’Donnell, there is a definite religious attraction. In a fascinating afterword that lays out her inspirations and intentions she states, “It is another marvelous poetic fact that there are as many lines in the sonnet as there are stations in the Stations of the Cross, the road to Calvary being the template for every human pilgrimage” (73).
It turns out the number “14” has inspired further accommodations. The book is divided into four sections, each containing 14 poems with the rationale that “The four sections correspond to the four seasons of the year (as well as the seasons of life), are suggestive of the four elements within which our lives are grounded (earth, wind, fire, and water), and roughly follow the movement of the liturgical year” (73). A serious architectural scheme thus asserts itself, but is that enough to produce memorable, even readable poetry?
I moved into this cathedral-like structure of verse with commonplace twenty-first-century concerns. I’m a little awed by formal poetry, which can strike me as archaic and, frankly, overwrought to the point of being artificial. However, my fears were allayed, starting with the first Still Pilgrim poem. O’Donnell has updated the sonnet with fresh language and all-important restraint. Perhaps it’s Shakespeare’s success with the love sonnet that makes some think of the sonnet as a flowery form. O’Donnell’s lines prove less descended from the Bard than kin to sharply honed song lyrics. She strips her lines down to essential sensual and emotional words. Eschewing surface effects, her sonnets do more with less. Whether addressing family love, motherhood, maladies, and death, aesthetic pleasures fostered by favorite poets and painters, travels near and far, the poems manage to carve deep.
An example can be found in “The Still Pilgrim Recreates Creation.” In the poem God’s labors are mirrored by a beverage-equipped woman cooking in her kitchen: I’ll call this volcano, she said as the pot bubbled up, thick red sauce spewed and spat all over the pristine stove. She cooked sober except for the glass of red pinot in her right hand (she stirred with her left). The pasta water roiled with life. she poached fresh pears in thick merlot.
This is typical, bracing O’Donnell style with its animated, kick-in-the-pants verbs and subdued adjectives, not to mention choice details that entice us to use our imaginations to further furnish the kitchen scene. The poem proceeds with the sestet: She had six days, no place to go in which to make this tasty world, invent foods she didn’t know, seat her children (a boy and a girl) at the table, the first feast. The whole earth smelled of bread, rising yeast. (19)
God’s creative capabilities have been passed on to humans who create their own wonders out of God’s materials, in this case fashioning offspring and delicious food. Notable, too, is the optimistic tone as one practically is invited to inhale the last yeasty line that has invaded the entire planet.
As lively and affirming as this is, an authentic journey through life must show the poet taking into account less sanguine moments. A few pages later we arrive at the other end of the mood scale. In “The Still Pilgrim Hears a Diagnosis” O’Donnell prepares to launch into a “white grim gray” day in her life by supplying beneath the poem’s title a foreboding quote about multiple sclerosis. The poem that follows ends like this: I drove my car to the hospital. The narrow halls were white grim gray. The doctor acted cheerful despite the words she had to say. I sat beside my grown young son and hoped for blessing. There was none. (23)
As we encounter more of the vicissitudes of life through the Still Pilgrim persona, a poetic response starts to emerge. It involves making something palatable out of whatever is given each day. In “The Still Pilgrim’s Thoughts upon Rising” she awakes to find “The chairs askew, the table crumbs / the dishes stacked up in the sink. / Yesterday’s dress tossed across the bed.” But this domestic detritus leads not to despair but to thoughts “of how the world just waits for us.” The rediscovery of all that was abandoned the previous night constitutes an invitation to resume one’s life of fixing and rearranging. Ultimately, what others might call a mess “places us exactly ‘where we belong’” (51).
The poet is not afraid to contemplate messier messes. In “The Still Pilgrim Considers a Hard Teaching,” the poet enters a space where she challenges herself to “cherish” the entire human race, including “the suicide bomber, the killer cop, / the war-worn refugee at the door, / the racist, the rapist, the brute drug lord, / the filthy rich and the dirty poor—” (35). Her refusal to turn away from what has gone wrong is consistent with “The Still Pilgrim Recalls the Beatitudes,” which ends with the couplet, “Blessed are the witless, blessed are the fools / Blessed is the broken kingdom love rules” (52).
It should be noted that there’s a wonderful effect derived from the device of making the eponymous Still Pilgrim the hero of every poem. After reading a half-dozen or so of the poems, the Still Pilgrim starts to function as a sort of every-person, one who shares some particulars with the poet, especially her religious sensibilities, but not necessarily all of them. She is a flexible literary persona, acquainted with the ancient and the contemporary, subject to shifting moods—sometimes within a single poem. One day she strides boldly in her “size nine pumps” (4); another day the swagger is replaced by sober memories as she stands before a childhood tree, now a stump, “reminder of all we had lost” (15).
Besides their form and narrative character, the poems are linked by the texture of the language. Spare without feeling constrained, many lines stand alone as worthy of contemplation: “But you are you, my mystery, / my gray-eyed boy, my history” (21), “the moth became the spider’s toy” (29), “The olive trees that bend their / chiseled limbs in surrender / to the gold god in his long ride west” (38), “She smiled with a ghost of her old grace” (46), “squirrels spit verses on the garden wall” (59).
Perhaps the ultimate test of the strength of a poet is to observe her following in the footsteps of a poet who has already taken a subject and addressed it in an iconic way. It’s not necessarily a test many poets should submit to; however, in “The Still Pilgrim Faces the Wall,” O’Donnell enters the territory of a much-anthologized poem, “Facing It,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s meditation on the Vietnam War Memorial.
O’Donnell begins with a necessary description of the structure which is “Stone cold amid a field of snow / fifty thousand names carved in black granite.” By the end of the octave, we are given a sharp insight as the edifice is labeled our “holy wailing wall.” Still, we might be forgiven for wondering how the poet can reach a satisfying end with most of her sonnet already depleted. We don’t expect her to top Mr. Komunyakaa, but is it possible to avoid some kind of falling off? It draws us in, its dark grave wake rippling beneath the winter sky. What can we give, we who take our breaths before these men who died? Our shadows frozen, thrown on stone, turn away, leave them alone. (45)
The final couplet arrives like a cold slap to the face. Contrasted with the stately cadence of the lines, our voyeurism feels almost violent as does our inevitable leaving. In its own way, the poem is as compelling as Komunyakaa’s. It’s certainly more minimalistic, keeping it strictly aligned with the aesthetic of Maya Lin’s architectural masterpiece.
I can’t overstate my enjoyment of poems that were able to get into something of substance and get out quickly, like a thief who plies her trade without disturbing a hair on the dozing cat. As for the results of O’Donnell’s heists, they almost always surprised me, yet at the same time felt just right, each outcome nearly preordained, an effect surely helped along by the sonnet form. It’s a form that recedes into the background. Like a woman at the ball who’s wearing a glittery gown and the man in the tux who has joined her, we’re invited to relax into the pleasures of the dance. Awareness of formal surroundings recedes; it’s just us and the poetry that moves us along.