Angela Alaimo O'Donnell is both a poet and a professor - and a subscriber to this newsletter! Her new book of poetry, Holy Land, attends to the belief that "The Holy Land is everywhere." (--Black Elk) In this issue, we reflect upon her poetic art and spiritual wisdom.

Holding a trove of literary wisdom - poems by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell - I first enjoyed random glances at life on Holy Land by flipping page to page, like one would feast on fine “amuse bouche” at a favorite French restaurant. In Section I, I got a taste of the poem “The Women” (women at the Resurrection tomb) – my response was “I love these poems.”

Next, I sampled a poem in Section II from Crossing Ireland, “Country Kerry” in which O’Donnell describes the nature (mystery) under the nature (earth). In Section III, “Ancestral Lands” we are served the meat and potatoes of life, in the Holy Land on which all of us gradually become ancestors ourselves. “Sounding the Days (Section IV) acknowledges “The Land of All Souls”: “They are here with us at the breakfast table” celebrating souls with us, side by side.

The poet serves us an array of gourmet desserts in Section V, “Literary Islands” followed by “Border Songs (Section VI) -- a bitter sip of a digestif reminding us that, even in the Holy Land, many people have nothing to eat, no banquet table, no freedom, no future, no life.

The poem that I most feast on is a serving from the Rule of Benedict Prologue: “Listen with the ear of your heart” –

Listen! He said, so I did.

Heart which has the word hear in it.

And I hearted the loon on the lake.

I hearted the skyful of blue.

I hearted the grass, for pity’s sake,

It made so much noise growing.

I hearted the sunlit leaves on the trees.

….

Listen! He says,

Once again Angela O’Donnell keeps one foot on the land and one foot in the numinous. The power of her poetry sends the message without saying the words. There are random touches of the holy, even in darkness and broken humanity. Holy Land poems present the foundational belief in the presence of God – Jesus continues to show up.

Although Holy Land begins with poems inspired by a pilgrimage to the lands where Jesus walked and taught, O’Donnell is convinced that all land is holy land, and that “Christ sightings” can occur in the most ordinary places.

The third section of her book, “Ancestral Lands,” focuses on the fraught terrain of home and family. “The Land of Childhood” recalls joyful memories of July 4 picnics, when her father drove them to “the distant mountains, the spring-fed lake” where the children would swim “till our lips turned blue from the biting cold. / The day would never end. We would never grow old.”

But there are also painful memories: “the neighbors who disdained us, / who knew we didn’t fit” (“304 Washington Street”) and, most hauntingly, the father who died when Angela was only 8. “The Land of Daughterhood,” written on the 53^rd anniversary of her father’s death, begins “So long ago you left us,” and addresses her father as “a man forever absent in my mind.”

This poem, and others, ache with loss and regret. But there is also celebration, as in “A Cana Blessing," written for a family wedding. The first stanza recalls Christ’s miracle at the wedding in Cana, “where the water that he stirred could not remain the same.” The second stanza extends the blessing to the present:

And so Christ comes to touch these lovers here,

to change young love into love full & fine,

love that pours out plenty from year to year,

love in such excess it is theirs and yours and mine.

For O’Donnell, both the ache and the joy, the laughter and the tears can be sacramental, signs of the holy, “stones I hoard and palm, things of earth, / that feel, for all the world, like beauty” (“Home Bound”). In “The Land of Dreams,” she dreams of a baby “who spoke adult words. / Everythng’s a blessing & all is holy.” The poem concludes

he had glimpsed the vision mystics do,

wrapped in his blankets of baby blue,

and delivered himself to me and you.

Thank you, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, for delivering the vision to us.

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