Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage

Abstract

I have admired Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and her poems from the moment I first encountered them twenty years ago. A poet of vast imaginative range, she has the will, wit, and bravura to reinvent herself and her oeuvre to accommodate whatever muse hovers over her.This luminous new volume quietly astonishes. It contemplates, in a series of inventive hybrid sonnets, spanning a period from March 22, 2020, to March 22, 2021, the first year of lockdown under the rule and cloud of COVID. Her title pays homage to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel that champions love as the ultimate balm to misery and dissolution.Pilgrimage, in O'Donnell's economy, is the operative word. Here, as in all of her work, we see the world through the lens of the seeker, the questing pilgrim, discovering with wonder the minute-by-minute offices and rituals of drawing breath on this earth. “These poems map a private pilgrimage to nowhere,” she writes in the preface, “—from the chair to the couch, from the couch to the chair.” But beyond these “private” visions under sequestered circumstances, there emerges a global awareness; the poems “map a public pilgrimage . . . from dire disaster to the hope for healing.”In a work well structured, choreographed really, its individual sonnets are the varied rooms, at once familiar and foreign, the suddenly compartmentalized life by and in which the speaker is both confined and liberated, rooms into which readers traipse along with the speaker, conscious that O'Donnell is writing herself (and us) out of that diminished, threatening, yet numinously amplified, world. The poems are prayers, a litany of praise, of hope, of gratitude. Even as the world draws up, it opens; and, though its subject is often grave, Love in the Time of Coronavirus is not doleful. It is also rife with whimsy and a wry, endearingly self-effacing humor. In “Lockdown Metamorphosis,” the speaker likens herself to a caterpillar building time in its chrysalis, “pure goo,” only to emerge “a butterfly with an attitude.”Each poem is crafted with pristine care (there's even an acrostic sonnet), and the collection is embedded with O'Donnell's characteristic allusions to faith and social and restorative justice. In the near-apocalyptic realm of COVID, these poems hold fast to home in all its sacramental valence: tranquility, surrender, the recognition of the simple gifts that had been there all along: “flowers on all the tabletops, / lilacs and lilies, larkspur and rose.” One of the finest sonnets, “Our Emmaus,” invokes Transubstantiation in the throes of an evening meal: Better to sit here. Just me and you.To set on our table olives and wine,to savor the taste of sweet grapes and brine,to raise our glasses and toast the poor dead,to mend the world and break our bread.The family meal, it goes without saying, is the single strongest representation of divine immanentism in the world of the southern Italians.The sonic heft and thrum of these splendid poems—the transformative love that beats so passionately in a seemingly shrunken world—ring like Sanctus bells long after the volume concludes.