Still Pilgrim: Poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (review)

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...