Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “The View from Childhood”

We all have childhood and family stories, good ones, bad ones, and usually some of each. Childhood shapes us, helping us be the adults we eventually become. We learn things, directly and indirectly, by living in the families we have. 

In The View from Childhood: Poems, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell takes both a candid and loving look at her Italian Catholic immigrant family. It’s a loving look, one that includes thankfulness to her elder siblings for introducing her to serious poetry (she says she originally wanted to be an opera singer). But like all families, there are things you don’t want to learn and prefer not to see. But they’re there, and you learn to come to terms with them. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Orthodoxy – poem by Scott Cairns at The Rabbit Room.

 

Praise Song for My Mother – Andrea Potos at Every Day Poems.

 

The Charge of the Light Brigade – poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson at Every Day Poems.

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and "Dear Dante"

If I were asked to name the greatest poets in human history, I would likely name five: Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Milton. There they are: a Greek, a Roman, a Florentine, and two Englishmen. Yes, the list reflects my Eurocentric perspective, but there it is. 

Dante (1265-1321) serves as a pivot point between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the more recognizable modern world of Milton. Chaucer (ca. 1340s-1400) is chronologically close to Dante and is believed to have memorized at least parts of Dante’s The Divine Comedy by heart. While many of the people mentioned in The Divine Comedy are not well known today outside their own historical era, that doesn’t detract from the greatness of the poetical work.

 

In the summer of 2021, to mark the 700^th anniversary of Dante’s death, poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell decided to reread The Divine Comedy by one canto a day (100 cantos, she wrote, and about 100 days of summer, seemed an almost perfect match).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The calm after the storm,” poem by Giacomo Leopardi – Beverley Bie Brahic at The New Criterion.

 

Pax – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

A Conversation with Maurice Manning – Ben Palpant at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

No wait – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and "Holy Land"

Most of us associate the term “Holy Land” as the area encompassing Israel, Gaza, and parts of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Sinai Peninsula. It has a fairly fixed religious connotation, encompassing three of the world’s major faiths – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has that connotation in mind as well, at least for the first 16 poems of her new collection Holy Land, inspired by an actual visit to the region. 

But for O’Donnell, “Holy Land” encompasses other regions, not only those that are geographic but also those of the imagination. The lands your ancestors came from, like Ireland, is one such holy land. Another is the land, or lands, where you spent your childhood; for O’Donnell, that includes Baltimore. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Love in the Time of Coronavirus”

During the lockdown for COVID-19, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and her husband hunkered down in a small town just outside New York City. And she did what you might expect a poet to do. She wrote poems. She wrote her poems in an almost journal-like experience as she followed the trials and travails of the pandemic.  

The result is Love in the Time of Coronavirus, a collection of 57 poems chronicling the advent of the virus, what happened, and how the lockdown conditions gradually eased. Like many poetry collections, this one is personal. Its title pays homage to the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a story of another pandemic, another time, and another place.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.