Lovers’ Almanac

By Angela O'Donnell

Lovers' Almanac is a collection of poems that explores the varieties of love that human beings experience. Anchoring the volume is a 12-poem sonnet sequence featuring an intimate dialogue between a man and woman, each poem keyed to one of the months of the year. The book offers a range of poems engaging divine love, agapeic love, familial love, fraternal love, parental love, and homage, the love we bear towards artists, saints, and heroes. As the title implies, Lovers' Almanac also explores the concept of time and the ways in which love is grounded in the succession of seasons--both the seasons of the year and the seasons of life. These incarnational poems devote attention to embodied, incarnate love, evident in all times and places, and celebrate the power of love to open us up, save us from the prison house of self, and redeem us from the suffering human beings are heir to. Love accompanies us throughout the course of human life, from birth to death, defying loss, loneliness, aging, and our inevitable mortality. The premise of the book might be summed up by one of its epigraphs, echoing St. Paul: "Love never fails."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498218412

Angela O'Donnell

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell teaches English & Creative Writing at Fordham University and serves as Associate Director of Fordham's Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. O'Donnell has published three collections of poems, Saint Sinatra, Moving House, and Waking My Mother, and two chapbooks MINE and Waiting for Ecstasy. Other titles include The Province of Joy, based on the prayer life of Flannery O'Connor, Mortal Blessings, a meditation on everyday sacraments, and Flannery O'Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith, a brief biography. Readers may visit her on the web at http://angelaalaimoodonnell.com/.

Book preview

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Lovers’ Almanac

Poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

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Lovers’ Almanac

Copyright © 2015 Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978–1-4982–1840-5

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-1841-2

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Brennan

Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon, with the old moon in her arms.

—Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence

For we have seen on our way and fallen in love

with the world that will pass in a twinkling.

—Czeslaw Milosz

Late have I loved you

Beauty so old and so new

Late have I loved you.

—St. Augustine

Love never fails.

—St. Paul

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared or are forthcoming:

Alabama Literary Review, "On Finding a Copy of The Wellfleet Whale in Wellfleet"

The Song of Things

Christian Century, On Botticelli’s Annunciation

For Shadowment: Villanelle for the Solstice

The Hidden Life

The year begins & love hides hushed

Mezzo Cammin, On Edward Hopper’s ‘A Woman in the Sun’

Betrayal (formerly, Diagnosis: Human)

Anniversary Poem

Homing

Monosyllabics

Post Road, "Reading Crusoe on the Metro