For love of Dante

What makes contemporary poets so oddly, and even perversely, attracted to Dante Alighieri? Like the scores of acquaintances whom Dante imagines either burning in hell or clambering upward toward ecstasy, poets find it hard to resist tracing the pilgrim’s tortured footsteps in violent times. Echoing Dante’s characteristic three-line rhyme scheme in a memorable section of his Four Quartets, published during the Second World War, T. S. Eliot imagines himself on dawn patrol during the London Blitz, when he is stalked by a mysterious stranger who—like Dante’s Virgil or Beatrice—knows more about him than he does about himself. A generation later, in Station Island, Seamus Heaney, haunted by a Catholic childhood in strife-torn Northern Ireland, imagines several encounters with all too familiar ghosts (and there’s that Dantean rhyme scheme again) as he treads his way through the ancient Irish pilgrimage path known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory.

But there are less solemn ways to encounter the long-dead poet at this beginning of the eighth century after his poem’s completion. “You are the bomb,” says Angela Alaimo O’Donnell in Dear Dante. This savvy, winsome, and disarmingly irreverent collection of poems has less in common with the solemnities of an Eliot or Heaney than with the sass of the American poet Mary Jo Bang. For Bang’s slangy but sophisticated translations of Dante’s poem, O’Donnell’s charmingly backhanded love letter can provide an equally transgressive Virgilian guide.

O’Donnell offers 39 poems in this short book, 13 for each of Dante’s three canticles (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), with three additional poems as prologue or epilogue. She likes things that come in threes, mirroring Dante’s trinitarian obsessions. He devised 100 cantos, divided into 33 cantos in each canticle (33 being the traditional christological age), with one extra canto at the outset functioning as a kind of prologue. O’Donnell sensibly limits her options.