Moving House: Poems.

Kolin, Philip C.

Moving House: Poems. By Angela Alaimo O'Donnell. Cincinnati: Word Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-934999-72-1. Pp. 17-95.

Moving House is Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's first-full length book, though many of the 49 poems here appeared in her earlier chapbooks Mine (2007) and Waiting for Ecstasy (2009). Like the titles of these, Moving House resonates with a multitude of meanings residing inside the word house--corporality, physical dwelling, family heritage, psychic geography, poetic text, literary kinship, burial plot, and heavenly home. Though written for the most part in taut, compressed lines, her poems read more like conversation between the poet and her earlier selves or between O'Donnell and her audience invited to share the intimacy of memory conferring meaning, whether in a domestic space or a shrine. Divided into seven untitled sections, Moving House charts her spiritual journey from the coal mining region around Wilkes-Barre and Scranton to Baltimore and finally to Fordham where she is the Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. On her journey we tour the various houses in which O'Donnell links the eternal to the temporal, the mystery of the incarnation. Rooted in a theology of loss and gain, her poems physicalize the spiritual but also spiritualize the physical. Deftly weaving the metaphors of scripture into poems about the quotidian world of the flesh, O'Donnell brings us closer to the divine. In "Grandma's Pears,' for instance, she describes the old woman paring and eating the "Sweet, sinewy fruit" from her garden: "She places a wafer upon her tongue, / works it with her gums, / and swallows softly / this new world's body, / her yard full of pearls of great price" Here is an example of the "language of eternity and once" ("Tattoo"). Structurally appropriate, too, the first poem in Moving House is titled "Lies" while the last is "New Year's Eve Poem"; between cruel illusions (a consequence of living in a postlapsarian world) and the birth of a new year (resurrection) lie the epiphanies O'Donnell discovers and discloses.

The early poems focus on her dark memories of a bleak childhood filled with the "black smoke rising from the mines" ("Touring the Mines") where her Italian immigrant ancestors labored. Everywhere the air is dowsed with sulfur, a consequence of the mining community and O'Donnell's psychic trauma. From the "darkened parlor" of the house where she grew up, we hear about a malfunctioning "furnace that coughed deep in the cellar" ("Northern Lights"). In one of the most harrowing images, she recalls that when she visited her grandmother, "The frayed floral carpet / [was] all that held us from a head- / long tumble down the mine- / shaft dug beneath the house long before"; she feared that the "weight of her play" on "warped floor boards" could "plunge us straight into Hell's own doorstep" ("Grandmother's Living Room"). From this childhood fear of hell, she portrays family members, some of whom evoke scenes from a Flannery O'Connor story. Cousin Junior was "an arsonist/who set himself on fire" ("Lies") until "he blazed by his own light" ("Fool's Art"). In a sadly sardonic inversion of The Wasteland, O'Donnell professes that "April is the kindest month," for that is when her angry and terrifying father died. Sadly, there will be "No poems for you, my father / I was always too afraid" ("Late Elegy"). Her mother dated a "Blues Man"--"Gravel-voiced boyfriend / ... lean hipped broad grinned, / easy like a brother, / the kind of man / who'd walk in the house / and make the women cry," but he is tragically killed in a car accident. Her friends' mothers, though, "didn't like my mother, / grew green-eyed in the grocery, / cold-shouldered us at Mass" ("Other Mothers"). O'Donnell's genealogy of loss is succinctly summed up in the poem "Lies": "we lived and died by the stories in that house."

Not surprising, many of O'Donnell's "houses" are elegiac, graveyard poems about the canonized as well as the less noble dead. "What lives lies buried," she writes in the "Meaning of Birds," a powerful testimony to the sacred belief in the communion of saints and the promise of resurrection. In "Kind Ground," she lovingly describes a grandfather who "doted on the roses / rising out of Grandma Salvi's grave"; it is the "Kind ground of an old man's exile, / he coaxed from it olives and figs. / Despite the deep winters, the alien / snow he stirred in it / what stirred inside of him," Perhaps this is another instance of O'Donnell's meddling with Eliot who smells lilacs in the land of the dead, but, as elsewhere, she skillfully maps the journey within. In "November Visit," the season of "All Saints, All Souls," she contemplates that it is "Time to walk awhile / ... we who remember / in ghost glimpses / ... the lost timbre / your shining eyes." Wishing her loved ones to return, she cautions "Avoid the nettles / and the briar patch / that would bleed you back into bodies," a transformation echoing Donne's wit in the Songs and Sonnets. The grave site is not always a kind and private place in Moving House. While traveling 'Amtrak 86," she observes how the dead "lie in neat rows" juxtaposed to "junkyard heaps of plastic play houses, / door-less cars teetering at the top."

In several poems, O'Donnell reverently visits the graves of canonized writers who have helped her construct her moving house. In "Glasnevin Graveyard," she honors Hopkins, in "St. Henry" it is Thoreau, and at St. Edvard's shrine, she pays obsequies to one who had to "suffer as we all must for kind and kin." Lamenting the expanse of spirit confined to a mortal charnel house, another moving house, O'Donnell bemoans the fate of "St. Melville," forced to "sleep beneath six small feet of earth" after creating vast seas, and that "Old fire-lover, Jehovah-hater" in "St. Ahab" whose "weapon" was a "poetry of dread," But in "Saints' Lives" and "Jesuits" she turns the world's sorrow into sanctification. Even in these poems, though, O'Donnell does not spare readers the agony of their sacrifice, e.g., "St. Agatha's breasts [were] sliced and served" while "St. Lucy's mild eyes [fell] upon the dish." Referring to their martyred flesh, she playfully casts them as "girls all aglow with one desire / painted bright in hues of red and blue."

As the above, and many other examples demonstrate, O'Donnell's poems are the product of wit as well as wisdom. In "Druscilla Dance," Salome's sinfully venal sister's "painted toes strapped into her sandal met the magma first." In "Glitter makes everything better [sic]," she likens the temptation in Genesis to a woman entranced by the devil's bling. "Prometheus discovered fire / Eve discovered glitter / Bright baubles on the tree / the diamond in the serpent's eye" In a less pungent vein, O'Donnell shares an easy friendship with Dante as she prepares dinner ("Dante in the Kitchen"). As she busies herself with teapots, Coca Cola cans, frozen meat, lighting a broiler, and adjusting her apron, O'Donnell injects gory vignettes from The Inferno--e.g., "Simoniacs ... boiling in pitch" or "Ugolino graws on the head of Ruggieri"--and concludes: "Our worlds do not mesh / Mine and Dante's / Anywhere better than here." Two decades earlier, playwright Adrienne Kennedy wrote about a similar literary friendship in She Talks to Beethoven. But what makes O'Donnell's Moving House so surprisingly cohesive is that her style accommodates a variety of genres, or variations of a genre, be they eulogies, lyrics, meditations, or satires.

No less to her credit, Moving House proves that O'Donnell is a poet of careful pitch as well as sense. Her poems cry to be read aloud as she orchestrates them with alliteration and assonance. When her father tries to fix a rebellious furnace, "We'd hear the turn of the handle, the chunk / and swing of the metal door unhinged." As the "Blues Man" boyfriend drinks Scotch, the "ice would swish and ring / against the glasses," Hearing her sons play baseball, O'Donnell captures the sound of leather against leather in these lines: "the slap of the ball / in the glove's deep pocket" Standing on "cliffs / above the boulder-smashing sea" in "Inis Mor," O'Donnell discovers "Words flung against the wind / the wind flung back" another image that verbally and visually evokes the spiritual and the physical forces at work in her poems. There are many rooms in O'Donnell's Moving House, and I congratulate her on taking us on a virtual tour of their soundly constructed architecture.

Philip C. Kolin

University of Southern Mississippi