The Pilgrim’s Friend
O’Donnell’s poetic missives to Dante on his way through the afterlife offer her readers, in turn, a companion for the journey of the Divine Comedy.
Review by Mia Schilling Grogan
In her Introduction to Dear Dante, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell asserts that her new book began as a “species of accompaniment” when she decided to re-read the Divine Comedy in anticipation of its 700th anniversary and found herself responding to Dante, canto by canto, with her own poems. And a jacket blurb by the Fordham University professor and dantista Susanna Barsella similarly describes the book as a sort of pilgrimage that O’Donnell makes with Dante, inviting her readers to join the two poets en route.
Indeed, the experience of accompaniment belongs not only to the contemporary poet, deeply engaging her “master,” but to all who read the collection. Turning the pages, we too, are re-visiting Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, tagging along, listening to O’Donnell, a woman of our own times, as she both acknowledges Dante’s genius, but also interrogates the worldview that formed him and which is sometimes difficult to embrace. This is a collection best read straight through from beginning to end, perhaps, as I did, pausing between the realms to reflect and regroup before moving ahead. Read sequentially, as one would read the Divine Comedy itself, we feel the sweep of Dante pilgrim’s own journey, but also the growing intimacy and affection that O’Donnell clearly feels for “il miglior fabbro.”
After a single sonnet Prologue, O’Donnell, a master sonneteer, allows a different form to dominate the “Inferno” section of her book: the terza rima form of the Divine Comedy itself. There are sonnets here, as well, but as she begins her journey of response to Dante, the poet’s use of terza rima feels fresh and appropriately “open-ended.” The sonnet form most often creates a sense of closure, but the terza rima poems here are “questing,” full of forward movement, and questioning. Like any of us who have “journeyed half of our life’s way” (or more), O’Donnell knows she, like Dante, must face “places that the small soul dreads, / the world of reckoning / with the living and the dead,” and that we’ll all “have to go through Hell” to do so (“The Journey”). It’s a wry acknowledgment that these journeying poems necessarily ask us to encounter scenes and ideas we’d rather not face.
These journeying poems necessarily ask us to encounter scenes and ideas we’d rather not face.
In the “Purgatorio” section the sonnet gains greater prominence, perhaps because the poet here feels called to offer some challenges to Dante’s world view, and the definitiveness of the sonnet helps to make her points. Earlier, in “Inferno,” O’Donnell relied on a mono-rhyme sonnet to question the placement of suicides in hell: “No place / for mercy in their Maker’s mind…”. So here in purgatory, the poet questions the “penance that most haunts / me”: the torture of the gluttons who waste away, famished in sight of branches heavy with fruit. The speaker in “Dante among the Gluttons” observes: “Contrapasso proves to be the art / of cruelty, at times, instead of justice.” O’Donnell is interrogating medieval theology in poems such as these; she also relies on a mirror sonnet to suggest that surely Christ knew purgatory, though Dante does not place him there (“Christ in Purgatory”). Traveling canto by canto in a space between Dante and her own readers, O’Donnell asks Dante the questions we might raise, and she “translates” back to us Dante’s own pain, that for instance Virgil must remain in Limbo: “It seems cruel, given that his sin / is a mild one….He just couldn’t see / that God was God…” (“Virgil in Limbo”).
The final sonnet in the “Paradiso” section recalls that in Canto XXXIII of Paradiso, Dante loses his power of speech at the beatific vision. But for O’Donnell herself, it seems that coming this far on the journey with Dante has strengthened her own voice: this final section contains some of the most beautiful poems in the collection, including “Dante the Master Chef” and “Dante among the Blessed Souls.” Here we encounter with O’Donnell the vision to comfort those—surely all of us—who have lost a loved one, the feast of heaven:
Food for the soul and food for the heart.
The table is set—he gathers us in.
He promises more, an endless repast.
(“Dante the Master Chef”)
By this point, the Dante O’Donnell addresses is also the “Pilgrim Friend,” “conversant with stars, / companion of blessed saints and souls” who has brought us the story we “read and reread” because it “never gets old” (“Dante loses Beatrice”). Indeed! In two light-hearted sonnet Epilogues, O’Donnell playfully riffs on her own presumption in writing poems in response to Dante’s masterpiece—a feeling she acknowledged in her Introduction, but as she told us there, she chose to ignore for the chance to gain intimacy with Dante through this project. The gamble pays off for her and for her readers. We know very well that “A Dante doesn’t happen twice” (“Dante’s Bargain”), but we can feel grateful to O’Donnell for a book that in poem after poem sends us turning back to his great poem again and again—to read and re-read now also accompanied by another “pilgrim friend,” this perceptive and sympathetic poet herself.
Mia Schilling Grogan is Associate Professor of English at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. Grogan is a medievalist working in the areas of hagiography and women’s spiritual writing; she is also a poet whose poems have appeared in many journals, most recently The Christian Century, Presence, and Dappled Things.
Dear Dante: Poems was published by Paraclete Press on April 9, 2024. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
