Story, Structure, Music, and Imagination in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “Dear Dante”

Poetry review by Laura E. Lucht

The tantalizing cover blurb for Dear Dante, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s eleventh and newest book of poems, promises “a response to Dante’s epic poetry written in the poetic forms Dante loved best.” It struck me much like C. S. Lewis’ comment in The Four Loves that friendship sparks from discovery of a shared passion, where the sharers ask, “What, you too? I thought I was the only one.” Because like O’Donnell, I spent Covidtide reading Dante’s Divine Comedy—more slowly than her canto-a-day pace—and I keep trying various translations and listening to the original for sound and rhythm. I keep finding connections with other readers who dove into the Commedia in 2021 to honor the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death and to weather a global pandemic. The odd camaraderie among Dante’s fans whetted my appetite for O’Donnell’s book of poetry. Reading it has sent me back to the Commedia to revisit Dante’s resonant lines and images. This book nudges me to attend to craft and content—to model what O’Donnell does well, and to mind the gaps where I wish she would give something more.

The 42 poems in O’Donnell’s collection offer a thoughtful response to Dante’s Divine Comedy in form, content, and tone. She honors Dante’s order, devoting thirteen poems to each of the three canticles—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with one poem as Prologue and two as Epilogue. Like Dante himself as the poem’s protagonist, O’Donnell pursues a companioned journey. She travels with Dante as he traveled with Virgil. Along the way, like him, she asks questions, registers protests, and empathizes with sufferers she meets in Hell. She marvels at the labors of Purgatory and exults in the glories of Heaven. The resulting slim volume offers a curated microcosm of the Commedia.

This collection invites the novice reader of Dante deeper into his work and calls veterans to test their responses, stirring ongoing discourse with the great poem. Like Dante’s, O’Donnell’s poems are rhymed and metrical. Most are sonnets; some use Dante’s terza rima, while one piece adopts tetrameter quatrains. Epigraphs from the Mandelbaum translation frame each piece. O’Donnell clearly loves Dante and admires his work, even when she disagrees with him, and her final epilogue extols him. Evaluating this collection places me in a position parallel to O’Donnell’s stance toward Dante: that of an apprentice assessing the work of a master poet. Her approach permits me to respectfully question her text as she does Dante’s.

For a focusing lens, I turn to Gregory Orr’s rubric of Four Temperaments of Poetry from his 1993 essay that tensions limiting functions of story and structure against limitless functions of music and imagination. Excellent poetry blends all four parameters, but most poets favor one or two temperaments and must develop the others. Poetry suffers imbalance if it relies only on intensive impulses of story and structure (like the late Wordsworth), or only on extensive impulses of music and imagination (like Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane). Effective poems pair limiting forces with those that resist limitation—fusing story with music, for example, or structure with imagination. In Dear Dante, O’Donnell exhibits all four parameters. Her strongest poems build story and structure on Dante’s forms and plot, balancing these with music of end-rhyme and novel flights of imagination as she develops his themes. I will consider each of the temperaments in Dear Dante in more detail.

First, the story is Dante’s, tracing his arc from pride to humility, from lost to found on his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. O’Donnell’s thirteen-poems-per-section touch key points of that character-driven plot. In Hell, her readers meet Virgil and the great poets of Limbo, then whirl past the famous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, lament the suffering Suicides and Diviners beset by scornful devils, and bow to bereaved Ugolino, who gnaws for vengeance. In Purgatory, Casella’s song welcomes Dante in startled recognition. Virgil’s fans clamor their greetings on each cornice, and the poet Statius rejoices to join his esteemed mentor on the upward journey. The penitent Envious, Avaricious, and Gluttons pause their urgent disciplines to chat with the pilgrims. At the pinnacle of the mountain, Dante finally meets Beatrice, and in that pivotal moment, he turns to find Virgil gone. In Paradise, the plot diffuses into the reordering of desire through the increasing glory of ascending levels of heaven, from the changeable moon to the constancy of the fixed stars. Dante’s desires must shift at the end as Beatrice leaves his side, redirecting his attention to the whole host of the Empyrean and a glimpse of God. In the final plot twist, Dante’s “brief fleeting vision of God” (87) eclipses language.

Secondly, O’Donnell adapts Dante’s forms, using his flowing terza rima and formal Petrarchan sonnets. Flexible structure appears in “On Fame” (28-29), the one poem in ABAB ballad quatrains. O’Donnell bends the sonnet into the clever chiasmus of “Christ in Purgatory” (61), in paired sonnets that reverse their end-rhymes with riffs on each line, tracing Christ’s redemptive descent into suffering and faithful ascent through obedience. In this poem, O’Donnell notes that Dante refrains from sending Christ through Purgatory on his march from Hell into Heaven, thus short-circuiting the penitent path of redeemed sinners. However, she argues that Christ knows the formative power of temporal suffering from his own experience, and thus he grasps the essence of Purgatory. The chiastic structure of this poem scaffolds its argument.

Thirdly, O’Donnell’s music consists of end rhyme, with a mix of slant and full rhymes. Dante’s terza rima achieves a flowing music of rhythm and rhyme in Italian that is difficult to match in English. Writing terza rima that rhymes and scans is no small feat, but O’Donnell makes it seem deceptively simple—though some rhymes seem forced, and her rhythms can be inconsistent, with lax cadences that disrupt the formal schemes. Contrasting her stanzas to the formal verse of Dorothy Molloy, whose unexpected internal rhymes startle and delight the reader without tripping the rhythms, I wished O’Donnell would honor the rhythms and let rhymes fall in unexpected spots. Instead, she sometimes hobbles the rhythm to land rhymes at the ends of lines. Music is the weakest parameter of this poetry, with faithful rhymes that seem studied and rhythms that fall out of kilter. These verses would benefit from a stronger lyric weave of consonant correspondences and vowel variation, with assonance for emphasis. Other poets, including T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, and Christian Wiman, would argue that to mimic Dante, a poet must listen first for rhythm, to generate sound and sense.

Finally, imagination sparkles in O’Donnell’s volume as it illuminates Dante’s story. In Hell, O’Donnell pictures what Dante sees, wrestling with pity. “Virgil in Limbo” (47-48) envisions the dilemma that puzzles modern readers and contemporary believers. We’re disturbed by the sigh of lament that rises from virtuous pagans excluded from Paradise, condemned to dwell in shadow through a sin of omission: “The first of poets lives among the lost, / cursed by knowledge that arrived too late” (48). Imagination glimmers in “Postcard from Purgatory #1” (42), written in the voice of a penitent updating his mother on news from the cornices. It blazes in the vision of “Dante the Master Chef” whipping up a rich Italian feast for his readers and summoning them to the table of Paradise: “Food for the soul and food for the heart” (72). 

O’Donnell offers pushback to Dante at points typical for modern readers. At times, I wish to resist her exceptions, scuttling back to the original to check the accuracy of my reading. Are there really devils in Purgatory, as mentioned in her “Postcard” (42), or just the attendant angels I remembered? And is there really filth on the cornices of the mountain as the postcard-writer claims, or just the grotesqueries of formative discomforts? And then, who decides when penitents may ascend to the next cornice? In my reading, God and the angels champion the penitents’ ascent, rather than delaying it, as O’Donnell suggests in “Dante Among the Avaricious” (55-56). I witness the voluntary freedom of Statius arising from among the Spendthrifts on the Fifth Cornice, just in time to join Virgil and Dante as they pass.

The poems I liked best were those where O’Donnell admits that Dante captures some vital truth of the human condition. Responses to Dante typically offer a moment amidst the quibbles when the speaker’s voice drops an octave in recognition: “Yes—that’s just how it is.” For O’Donnell, this pivot toward personal identification arrives in “Swimming with Dante” (30), her sonnet in response to Inferno XII:

          I know this river. The river of rage.
Have stepped in it a time or two, and more.
Have felt it burn my soles. Left the shore
of sanity and love to wade its waters,
immerse myself in wrongs I could not right,
conjure violent wars I could not fight,
boil awhile in blood, my own and others’.

I remember such a moment on my first listen through Inferno, when I was pierced by Virgil’s words as he and Dante approached the Wood of the Suicides.

Like Dante’s, O’Donnell’s tone and themes range from the lofty and spiritual to the earthy and funny. A prime example of the latter appears in “Dante & the Devil’s Fart” (34), a sonnet laced with the slapstick humor of Inferno. This poem boasts the most eloquent stanza in the book, despite the coarse topic:

          Amid the fire, amid the smoke
erupts the sound and then the smell,
and then the roar of readers’ laughter
here in the hellscape of disaster.

O’Donnell’s language, like Dante’s, varies from simple and colloquial to complex and abstract. The high tone of her prologue and second epilogue, for example, contrasts sharply with the slangy banter of the first epilogue, “Dante, Darling” (90):

          You are the bomb. We all know it, too.
Our hearts belong only to you.
Your starved Ugolino haunts us still
long after the cover is closed
on your dope epic, your killer book.
No Medusa with her killer look
could keep us out of your Heaven or your Hell.

The tone of this encomium echoes Dante’s chatty asides to the reader that leaven his discourse.

O’Donnell joins the conversation with Dante alongside Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers, C. S. Lewis and Malcolm Guite, Seamus Heaney and Osip Mandelstam. Her thoughtful, accessible verse invites readers into lyrical discourse with the medieval master. In keeping with Dante’s choice of vernacular language for the Commedia to welcome all readers, this book calls poets of all levels to the table. O’Donnell’s balance of story, structure, music, and imagination offers a fitting response to Dante.

Laura E. Lucht grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and now lives near Seattle, Washington. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University and an MA International Studies from the University of Washington. Her poetry has appeared in Solum Journal, Ekstasis Magazine, and The Clayjar Review.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Dear Dante: Poems may be ordered at paracletepress.com/products/dear-dante for $21.00 plus postage. Check out her website: angelaalaimoodonnell.com. Dear Dante: Poems is published by Paraclete Press, 2024.

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