The Recovering Catholic’s Collection
Moonstone Press
$10.00
You can purchase your copy HERE
Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan
Being a fan of Eileen D’Angelo as well as a Catholic school (we’ll call it) survivor myself, I was intrigued by her latest chapbook, The Recovering Catholic’s Collection. As Catholic school graduates know, the preferred Catholic method of instruction often skews close to indoctrination. You do not just learn traditional subjects such as English, history, and math; or parochial ones such as the Old Testament, New Testament, and catechism; you also learn you will go to hell if you commit a moral sin and do not confess it, blind obedience, and that Catholicism is the only true religion. Freedom of thought is not encouraged in Catholic grade-school education. Unfortunately, for the nuns who taught her, D’Angelo is and, as a precocious child, was a free thinker.
In the opening salvo “Miranda Rights for Catholics,” D’Angelo deploys her keen wit and probing legalistic mind to Catholic school morality: “we need lawyers/ for the morally challenged. Experts in Sinner’s Law.” Imaginatively, she constructs a court case with a sinner lawyer who will “find the legal loopholes, hammer out/ plea bargains to avoid length trials/ on judgment day.” Humorously, this hypothetical lawyer would defend their client to the judging priest:
“You need intent to make that sin stick”
“How long will this remain on my client’s record?”…
“My client has suffered enough! She is a mere mortal
and your client is the All-Powerful and Loving God.”
An imperious nun (“penguin”) calls our young Eileen “brazen” after being found “in the church basement/ tempted by the fire of French kissing” in the poem, “Lines to Sister Consolata.” The penguin also mentioned she was “bound for hell.” Our young Eileen’s brazen inner voice “wanted to say: On the Brazen Scale of one to ten,/ I am only a five. I dared not ask: If God made me—/ then why did he make me brazen.” D’Angelo realizes that her former tormentor has “earned [her] eternal/ reward and rightful place at the right hand of God,/ because you were one year older than God/ when I was in the tenth grade.” Our young Eileen has grown up to be brazen slow dancing with electric hips, leaving “no room for the Holy Spirit,” and “making faces” behind Sister Consolota’s back. She ends the poem with the powerful line, “Even the word brazen feels good on my lips—/ this dangerous word marking a lost soul/ on the express train to Hell.”
D’Angelo recalls in the haunting poem, “The Gift,” that after sharing many of the poems contained in this collection an audience member approaches her with a pocket Bible “concerned for my immortal soul. You have a need to save/ a lost lamb.” The audience member also tells her that they will pray for her, and she wants “to believe it matters if you do.” After being told “God always has a plan,” D’Angelo wants to believe in a God that differs from the one she was offered in childhood by Consolata and the rest:
I want to find the compassionate God,
the one I’ve seen in paintings with kind, fatherly eyes.
I want to know if he is the same God who hurls
fires and floods to destroy his wayward children,
his children, who are lost like lambs.
D’Angelo probes all she had been taught to recite by rote: I know the seven levels of angels./ I know Heaven, Hell, Limbo and Purgatory to arrive at a hell of a conclusion: “I want to know what kind of sin/ does God commit when he allows the screaming/ to continue through my row-house thin walls?”
In this book, D’Angelo poignantly explores thanatopsis as evidenced in the poem, “Requiem for My Brother, Joseph.” The narrator performs her own funeral mass for her brother who died far away.
Tonight, I let myself wallow in it. Your photograph, propped up
by a paperweight, my mini-memorial of you. A lit candle
on my desk, a glass of sweet vermouth & a twist—
And it’s just you, me the keyboard—and a long night ahead.
The magic of this poem lies in its catharsis, through its near exorcism of pain. “This poem howls like the pipes in the Irish tunes you loved,/ wails like the banshee…Angels follow your purified soul/ (and I don’t need to see them to know they’re there.)”
Witty, feisty, contemplative, questing, and heartfelt, The Recovering Catholic’s Collection takes the reader on a journey through faith, life, and basic humanity. D’Angelo is a generous poet giving us words to ponder and words to heal, images to provoke laughter and images to generate empathy. Plus, a few tears. A true Irish writer in the best sense, the reader rests in D’Angelo’s palm enthralled by the tale she has to tell.
Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.