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Mine

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Poet and Fordham U. professor, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, has been known to sing as part of her public poetry readings. She has also had some of her poems set to music by a duo in Baltimore. Her songs rise from an Italian immigrant family background, full of loss and coal dust, dug out of the Pennsylvania mining world. Her words reveal a dark beauty, a truth of lives laboring in black, cold nights, fired by prayers and a music she recreates with rusty shovels, "the sluff of slippers across the kitchen" echoing Johnny Cash lyrics ("Northern Nights"), recitations of litanies of Italian family names found on grave stones visited on Sunday afternoons.
The poems in MINE are mostly elegiac in tone, lyrics of family, of a home life, of rituals, of landscapes in smoke, of hard love. There are poems for her mother who took lovers when she was made a widow:

Young ones. Dark ones. True ones,

the kind that came back,
parked their cars in the drive,

and slept in our house
night after night after night. ("Other Mothers")

There are also poems of a daughter remembering a lost father and of a mother now raising her own sons. Inspiring and well-wrought, O'Donnell's poems are witty, dusted with humor, dark at their roots. One of her mother's boyfriends is remembered in a vision of a musician who sang "blue" songs and drove a rusty Mustang into a bitter-sweet , burning wreck:

Too young, too risky,
too married, and too free
for a widow with three
daughters and two grown sons.

Her stanzas ring with good sounds, driven with a regular rhythm, perfect for conveying her bluesy theme, hinting at death cheated by a song:

I watch you stride slow
away from the burning wreck.
You don't hear us calling.
You're singing as you go. ("Blues Man")

O'Donnell's literary strengths are more than musical. She writes strong narratives informed by striking, smoking imagery, using the language of digging, mining the Underworld for black truths; lives recovered
in her story-poems are retold--an arsonist cousin ("Fool's Art"), a living room over a mine shaft, where the poet remembers "holy Mary on the western wall / suffering her sword-pierced heart" ("Grandmother's Living Room"). Her scenes are rich with literary allusions, such as this nod to Dante's INFERNO in the same poem:

Never did we move the ground
that lay beneath our feet.
No lost souls rose to guide us
through the winding world we conjured.
No matter how loud we shouted.
How wild we danced.

Or this one in "Dante In The Kitchen":

The dinner hour approaches,
Ugolino gnaws on the head of Ruggieri.
My children ask for hamburgers,
The red flesh fashioned, ready-
Wrapped in measured portions,
And stored in the coldest depths of the freezer.

Such a wonderful choice of words: "measured portions" of a poetry, stored in a poem reminiscent of cold depths (keep emotion at a distance, under control) but hot as a literary hell. She concludes her poem with a meditation on how her mother's world and her professor's world seem to combine with Dante's Underworld in her deep imagination:

Our worlds do not mesh,
Mine and Dante's,
Anywhere better than here
In this waning afternoon place
Of transformations.
I glide across the linoleum
In my gilded, lead-lined apron,
Light the flame on the broiler,
And breathe the hot heat.

The Italian-American poet bows to her ancestors and cooks for her family. How nourishing is the art she serves us.
Angela O'Donnell's poetry joins the spirit of Charles Wright, a poet who is also informed by Dante's literary landscape. But she can find the transcendent that Wright finds elusive. She also questions crevices, explores mine shafts, glides over dangerous landscapes, shines her miner's lamp into the holes of the human heart, believing it is her "task to stir these still waters of her family's past.

Shall I lie down beside them, one by one,
and breathe the breaths that rise from them like
prayers
and lay lash on lash, cool cheeck on cheek,
wade deep into their sepia waters?

Once there no music could call me back.
No season's bargain, no lover's tender lyre.
No toppled towers flaming in the distance.
No one's daughter. No one's mother. No one's wife. ("Waking The Children")

So beautiful. So contemplative. O'Donnell's poem here is post 9/11. She teches in NYC. She knows the landscape, the city-scape. But her poetry is heated with a power that comes from the core of our earth, made palpable in a language that is reverential for soul-making. Those who know her readings at the UMHB Writer's Festival know she is obsessed with MOBY DICK. She closes this collection with a tribute to lasting art which she admires. Her words are also a fitting comment on her own art, at once striving for now and for the eternal.

These marks, too, hieroglyphic,
A language of eternity and once. ("Tattoo")

This review appeared in the Jan 2009 Vol 13 issue of WINDHOVER (A journal of Christian Literature).
Michael Hugh Lythgoe, the reviewer, is a contributing editor of WINDHOVER. He is also the author of a collection of his own poetry, HOLY WEEK (ISBN: 978-1-4257-8264-1)

These are lovely poems that embrace unlovely realities--the hard life of "Coal Town," the families that labor beneath its ashen skies, the death of the father, the loves of the mother, spiritual hope dogged by spiritual despair. It is O'Donnell's superb, inspired language and forgiving imagination, of course, that survive the "slag heaps/ where culm dumps rise camel-backed," and in so doing, remind us of the salvation inherent in the art of poetry when it is performed at an exceptionally high level. Such is the quality of the finely crafted poems of Angela O'Donnell's Mine.
--B.H. Fairchild, author THE ART OF THE LATHE

Gritty and tender by turns, the poems in Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's Mine evoke a lost world--the world of an Italian immigrant family pitted and shaped by Pennsylvania's mining world. There's such a trenchant bite and unswerving gaze in these poems, and yet a sense of the real value of these people, who would otherwise go nameless, except for the care and honor O'Donnell evokes from this world which might so easily otherwise have lacked a local habitation and a name, a luminescence against the ravages of time.
--Paul Mariani, author of DEATHS AND TRANSFIGURATIONS