Angela Alaimo O’Donnell looks back on childhood and family
We all have childhood and family stories — good ones, bad ones, and usually some of each. Childhood shapes us, helping us toward 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 a both candid and loving look at her Italian Catholic immigrant family. It’s a grateful 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). As in all families, though, 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.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Threaded through the poems is the other significant influence on her life – her Catholic faith. She attributes her love of language to the family and church prayers, the words learned in catechism, the language of church rites and rituals.
O’Donnell writes about her coal miner father, her mother, her brothers and sisters, vacations, religious holidays, the first funeral she remembers attending, her first communion. She remembers her grandmother’s living room, and how her grandmother would chase her and siblings out of it with a broom. One poem is about her grandmother’s pears; it resonated with me in a specific way, because it made me recall my own grandmother’s pear tree, and how I’d gather fallen pears for her to make a cobbler.
In several of the poems she refers to herself as the “still pilgrim,” harkening back to her 2017 collection. That as a double meaning. She is still a pilgrim, and she is a still pilgrim, quiet, listening, observing, and storing it all up to remember when the time is right.
O’Donnell also writes of those family experiences that are so golden and wrapped with happiness and gratitude that they remain with you for the rest of your life. Like a visit to a lake in the Pocono Mountains.
The Land of Childhood
Hickory Run, The Pocono Mountains
We would wake early to pack the picnic,
dump the ice in the red metal cooler,
stack the bowls of cold food our mom had fixed—
pull the baked ziti hot from the oven,
bag sweet sausages wrapped in butcher paper
from Sperazza’s store. We were Italians
and loved July 4th like Americans.
The Pontiac loaded with lunch and children,
my father would drive the backcountry roads
to the distant mountains, the spring-fed lake
where we’d swim all day till our arms & legs ached,
till our lips turned blue from the biting cold.
The day would not end. We would never be old.
O’Donnell’s other collections of poetry include Dear Dante, Andalusian Hours, Still Pilgrim, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems, Moving House, Waking My Mother, Lovers’ Almanac, Waiting for Ecstasy, and Mine. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines. She’s a professor at Fordham University in New York City, where she teaches English, creative writing, and American Catholic Studies. She was graduated from Penn State University and received her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in English Language & Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
You don’t have to be part of an Italian Catholic family to understand and fall a little bit in love with what O’Donnell has done with The View from Childhood. She’s remembered clearly and with a poet’s keen eye. She’s also remembered lovingly, and with gratitude.
Related:
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Dear Dante.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Holy Land.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Still Pilgrim.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Andalusian Hours.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Love in the Time of Coronavirus.
Photo by Ian Sane, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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