{"id":2032,"date":"2017-08-15T11:23:17","date_gmt":"2017-08-15T15:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/?p=2032"},"modified":"2017-08-15T11:51:08","modified_gmt":"2017-08-15T15:51:08","slug":"paradox-at-the-heart-of-poetry-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/index.php\/paradox-at-the-heart-of-poetry-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Paradox at the Heart of Poetry\u2014In Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An excerpt from a review by\u00a0Charles Hughes<\/a>\u00a0(<\/span>August 4, 2017)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Paradox colors the world, especially when seen through the eyes of faith, and paradox is at the heart of these poems. Consider the collection\u2019s title:\u00a0Still Pilgrim<\/em>. How can a pilgrim, who is a traveler by definition, be characterized as still? \u201cThis world was never made for rest,\u201d says \u201cThe Still Pilgrim Ponders a Paradox,\u201d the poem serving as the book\u2019s epilogue. \u201cAnd still you stay as still can be \/ unmoved by your velocity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In these poems, the Still Pilgrim<\/a>\u2014seemingly the poet\u2019s alter ego\u2014reflects on longing and the world\u2019s impermanence, the fleetingness of time and vivid memories, piercing joy and piercing grief.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Even the most intense joys in these poems\u2014as in the real world\u2014never fully break free from the shadow of defeat and sorrow. The reader gets the sense that the Still Pilgrim is making a one-step-forward, two-steps-back kind of progress, which brings to mind C. S. Lewis\u2019s description of fallen human life before God in\u00a0The Problem of Pain<\/em>: \u201cThus . . . all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping, falling away\u2014as if God were . . . a smooth inclined plane on which there is no resting.\u201d<\/div>\n
Companionability is a poetic virtue of special importance in our time and place, and it is abundantly present in O\u2019Donnell\u2019s poems. The Still Pilgrim says of her (by no means affluent) childhood home: \u201cYou\u2019d never know we were among the least. \/ Bread was our mercy. Wine was our cure.\u201d There is a generosity of spirit here, an unself-absorbed openness about the triumphs and vulnerabilities of our common experience of life. O\u2019Donnell\u2019s poems assume\u2014even as they\u2019re reaching toward it\u2014a deep connection, a kind of communion with readers. How countercultural. How necessary here and now.<\/div>\n

\u201cWe are living in an anti-art age. The world is now a brutal place and obsessed with speed and wealth.\u201d So said singer and songwriter Paul Simon in a 2015 interview, and one could understandably fear, in such an age as ours, that poetry has finally become irrelevant. But I would like to think, and Angela O\u2019Donnell\u2019s engaging and deeply humane poems in\u00a0Still Pilgrim\u00a0<\/em>encourage me in doing so, that poems will go on functioning as diverse mercies we can keep with us\u2014at home or away\u2014for the pleasure of their company and as a means of remembering who we are.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read the full review from The Christian Century<\/a><\/p>\n

Angela Alaimo-O’Donnell on how Stil Pilgrim came to be…
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