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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 57 > Reviews >Angela Alaimo O’Donnell's Moving House

Moving House
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Word Press
ISBN Number: 9781934999721

Reviewer: Barbara Crooker


          In this, her first full-length poetry collection, Angela O’Donnell explores the theme of “home,” not in a cozy, Hallmark-y way, but in delineations as sharply etched and striking as the cover art by Margie Crisp, “Inferno on Dumbwater Creek.” O’Donnell offers the home of childhood, built on the bones of the past and the seams of coal her Italian immigrant forebears mined; the home of the Catholic church, both the church of the present and the historical one; the literal homes of her adult life, the house in Baltimore and the one in a New York City suburb; the house that Poetry built, where she nails up tributes to her heroes in both poetry and prose: Shakespeare, Dante, Melville, Thoreau, Sexton, Hopkins. And there’s the House of Art, where Manet, Wyeth, Vermeer, and Munch decorate the walls. O’Donnell’s sense of the past runs as deep as bedrock, as does her sense of faith, a rare thing in this postmodern age.

          O’Donnell offers us an ongoing invocation of the senses, such as her sense of the past: exploring her family heritage, the hardscrabble life of a coal town, the gritty self-determination of her immigrant grandparents. She writes: “I find my mind/ yearning for what’s lost/ to me, all that’s left behind” (“Reading in the New House”). O’Donnell doesn’t light her poems in the false glow of nostalgia, but rather in the hard blue of bitumen, looking at her father’s long silence, quick anger, early death, her mother’s sometimes inappropriate boyfriends (“Blues Man”), her arsonist cousin, the loss of community moving from Baltimore to start again in Bronxville.

          Then there’s her sense of art history: on a train heading north, “where Vermeer’s blue girls/ pour milk and weigh pearls,/ his windows spilling Delft light/ across the Met’s white walls” (“Amtrak # 86”); her sense of deep time, of being in two places at once; her sense of being Catholic, with poems like “Jesuits,” “Saints’ Lives,” “November Visit,” and “Blessing” (with its central image of the alabaster statue of Mary who “stands straight/ in the arched niche…/ her infant son slung loose against her hip.”) as well as her depiction of secular saints: St. Melville, St. Edvard [Munch], St. Henry [Thoreau], St. Ahab; her attunement to the physical senses, manifested in the sensual pleasure of cooking: “slicing celery,/ paring the last apple into a pie,/ rolling out the canvas of crust,/ mincing butter into hard white bits” (“Making”).

          Throughout Moving House, O’Donnell makes effective use of an elegiac tone and finely crafted language. For example, in writing about the coal town where she grew up, she describes slag heaps where “culm dumps rise camel-backed/ against an ashen sky,” and the breaker looms with its “black apertures” (“Breaker”). Here, there are “coal-black nights,” where “the furnace coughed deep in the cellar” and “our father rose in the iron cold” (“Northern Nights”). O’Donnell has a keen ear for gritty sound: “the chunk/ and swing of the metal door unhinged,/ the steady thrust of the rusty shovel/ graveling against the binful of coal” (“Northern Nights”). And then she hears something softer: “the sluff of slippers,/ mother’s voice calling us to hot milk at midnight,// to slip on coats and scarves and hats and gloves” (“Northern Nights).

          In a different poem, the l’s echo like miners’ picks. Taking a mine tour, which is “like Disney World, only true,” she sees “earth’s hull and hammer-/ struck walls of oily coal.” O’Donnell has a musician’s sense of rhythm: the coal, which was “heavy and inert,/ once above the surface/ …leapt to light and heat” (“Touring the Mine”).

          Later in the book, the mother, a young and merry widow, is revealed through carefully chosen diction as the mother who didn’t wear aprons or bake bread, but instead, “slipped on stockings/ stepped into heels, and went to work// late evenings,” who wore a “black mantilla/ shadowing her black eyes” (“Other Mothers”).

          In other parts of the collection, the language is almost Eucharistic: lines such as “inviting each to the feast that would follow” (“Manet’s Oranges”) and “She places a wafer upon her tongue/ …and swallows softly/ this new world’s body” (“Grandmother’s Pears”) operate as liturgies. In another poem, we encounter “water, the color of wine/ bread of spume and spurl, Christ striding in the waves every morning” (“Lost and Found”). “Waiting for Ecstasy” marries sorting the wash to St. Therese of Lisieux: “Our clothes writhe like the damned.” In “Annunciation,” O’Donnell writes about the human story behind the divine conception: “No husband’s touch, just a rush of air// and a poem she’d never heard/ singing in the silence.”

          O’Donnell’s poems echo with the delights of well-employed language. She has taken up her pick, put on her miner’s helmet, and descended into the shaft of the past, finding these gems of poems and bringing them to the light. Let’s hope that more books quickly follow this ambitious debut.
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