Todd Dillard’s Ragnarok at the Father-Daughter Dance, published by VariantLit, is truly a gift from the literary and poetic gods. In its verses, the living converse with the dead, children teach parents meaningful life lessons, and life continues in a love-filled house despite a pandemic’s uncertainty. Observant, intimate, and brave, Dillard’s poems embrace the “impossible because it’s every road”—an allegory for life’s joys and hardships, as well as an individual’s dreams, endeavors, and the reality of those dreams’ and endeavors’ outcomes. Moreso, the poems examine an individual’s power to be a lighthouse that guides others safely into their own role and purpose in life.
Dillard’s collection arrives at a crucial time in American politics and culture. As America enters a dark period in which women’s rights—and human rights in general—are threatened daily, Dillard’s verses serve as celebrations of the speaker’s daughter. Poems like “One Hundred Thousand Bells” and “Pandemic (Good Advice)” are odes to a daughter’s curiosity and fortitude. They are also poems that encourage fathers to celebrate and uplift the wonderment, strength, and knowledge their daughters bring to their own lives and to work to create a future in which those daughters can thrive and, most of all, survive. In “Pandemic (Good Advice),” the speaker sees themself as “the pupil” and their “little girl’s a guru / dispensing wisdom from high peaks of innocence.” One of the poem’s most magical moments is when, after sharing with her father that she’ll one day swim into the Atlantic and be swallowed by a monster, she reminds the father that they “can visit any time” if they throw themselves “into the deep.” The daughter encourages the father to practice “over and over again” if the father is afraid. The daughter’s imaginings are eerily prophetic, given the consequences the 2024 election results will have for girls and women across the United States, and the daughter’s encouragement of her father is a call to father’s everywhere to stand up for their daughters’ futures.
Other poems, like “No Rush,” explore grief’s depths. “No Rush” is exemplary in its portrayal of loss and acceptance. The distinctive, honest voice forms because of the direct, succinct images and line lengths. The speaker dreams “grief was an unlit room that I had to clean.” The speaker must figure out how to “navigate its darkness.” The grief culminates in the poem’s final three lines:
the storm splits open like sacramental bread,
and I love you I love you. Can you hear me?
Write me back when you have time. No rush.
The repetition of “I love you,” as well as its enjambment with the question “Can you hear me?” create a sense of urgency. The poem calms, however, in the final line. The line slows thanks to the sentence “Write me back when you have time,” the punctuation with a period, and the two-word phrase “No rush” creates a subtle, yet jarring and full, stop. The speaker’s incorporation of “No rush” also attests to the time one must allow for one’s grieving and how the time required varies from person to person, situation to situation.
The Covid-19 pandemic plays an integral thematic role in the collection. “Pandemic Menagerie” is reminiscent of the isolation and the coping mechanisms many individuals developed in order to temper the separation from loved ones. The poem opens simplistically:
I found a paper swan on the road.
One wing sopped in a puddle,
undercarriage grimed by rain.
The speaker seems to identify their own loneliness in the paper swan:
It must be lonely being, I thought,
always poised to fly.
I folded others: elephant, bunny, terrier, butterfly...
The speaker then makes “little plays” for the figures:
swan loves boar, horse loves swan,
tiger is worried about the crease in his tail....
then manger scenes
where Christ was a scuttling crab.
The figures have “dance parties, orgies, affairs” and mirror the myriad of ways humans attempted to gather during the pandemic, despite social restrictions. Imagination and absurdity reign in the poem, and the image of Christ as a “scuttling crab” is Bosch-like and laughable. Its absurdity balances the conclusion’s quaint images of “little dunes of snow” which “slid off windowsills”—an image that restores balance to the orchestrated chaos created by the speaker. Thus, the poem is an imaginative exploration of humanity’s follies and individual actions which often have consequences for the larger collective.
Ragnarok at the Father-Daughter Dance is a poetic testament to individual and familial fortitude during isolating and challenging times. In essence, it utilizes the pandemic’s tumultuous and difficult years as a practice-run for the pending days of darkness America is sure to have as it faces a second Trump presidency. However, despite the blackness and gloom present in many of the poems, the collection as a whole embraces hope and individual agency as mechanisms of individual and collective change. It encourages readers let their light “be coffee and zinnias, / orange peels and Chopin” and to embrace and celebrate the every day moments that could so easily be overlooked and ignored.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.