Still Pilgrim by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Put on your traveling shoes, comfortable for pilgrimage. Or take them off and be still a while. Both are proper for this collection of poetry.

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell created the persona of the Still Pilgrim for her latest collection of poems, aptly called Still Pilgrim, as a way of exploring passage and, in the monastic sense of the word, stability. The title on its own is ambiguous. A pilgrim who does not move? Still a pilgrim after all these years? As you read through the collection, you might be moved to answer yes to both questions---or no---at different points.

If you have read other writing (poetry or prose) from O'Donnell, you'll find familiar themes. Grief. The sensuality in life (and especially food). A sacramental outlook on life. The inherent hopefulness in each day.

In the poem, "The Still Pilgrim Makes Dinner," she deftly touches on all these with lines such as, "It’s Mother’s Day and I have no mother. / She left and took my daughterhood."  She goes on with details of the meal the pilgrim is cooking: frying oil, onions, the apron "soiled / by meals I've made for thirty years." Because I find hope in sacramental language, I am buoyed by the final lines (I recognize others may find them less so) as she concludes, "My mother, who is five years dead, / lives in this meat, these eggs I broke, / this dish she taught me how to make, / this wine I drink, this bread I break." In the 14 lines of this sonnet, we are given the way loss can lead to loss of self, but also how tradition and memory and, frankly, recipes can make that which was lost present again. Is it resurrection in the most literal sense? No, but I still find resurrection in this one poem. All these tangible things---chops, oil, flour, smoke---become so quickly "outward signs of inward grace."  All these sacramental items make present someone who is gone. I may be projecting but I am left with feeling that the pilgrim's dead mother both vanishes upon recognition and remains present in a meal.

(In case I need to be explicit, that one poem is possibly my favorite in the collection, and I've loved it since I read it on The Christian Century website, printed it out, and tacked it to my cubicle wall at work.)

The concerns of the Still Pilgrim span some distance, literal and metaphorical and metaphysical. She " . . . Invents Dawn" and " . . . Recreates Creation." She " . . . Sings to her Child" and " . . . Talks to her Body." She references other poets, considers sunrises and bird songs, wakes to the prayer of her beloved's breathing. She ponders perfection and the table manners of Jesus. The Still Pilgrim is ecstatic, sad, pensive, angry, forgiving, grateful, amused---in turn and simultaneously. She may "Sit back and enjoy the drama" or else run "like a woman catching fire."

The book opens with two epigraphs from T.S. Eliot (and a third from the Psalms), but I hope I will be forgiven if this collection brought to mind another, if perhaps too obvious, passage from Eliot:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, 
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, 
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, 
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.

I would suggest that this is a point the Still Pilgrim knows well. This collection invites us into the dance studio and the meditation room, to move into the mystery of life and death and joy and regret and to sit with it all in contemplation.

I will admit that, in order to get this review written in a timely manner, I read the collection too quickly, a sin against any poetry. What I will do---and recommend to you---is to take it slowly. As "The Still Pilgrim's Refrain" would teach us, there is satisfaction in " . . . again . . . again . . . again . . . "

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Full disclosure: Paraclete Press, the publisher of Still Pilgrim sent me a preview copy of the book for the purpose of review. The thoughts expressed in this review are my own and sincere.