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 53rd 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.
-- Bill