Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard
Variant Literature, 2024
Review by Susan L. Leary
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It is immediately apparent in Todd Dillard’s Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance that every act of witness is an act of admission, be it of love or terror, marvel or bewilderment, praise or self-doubt. Admissions like “I am a stupid horse, after all, sentimental, / prone to confusing what’s before me for what I want…” and “Every day I am terrified in new ways” and “I LOVE YOU CAN YOU HEAR ME I LOVE YOU” gallop across these pages and reveal the importance of transparency as a means for connection with self and others. The ability to express how one feels, fully and with no reservation, is often perceived as a great challenge, but the speaker of these poems willingly engages those deeper internal recesses, always leaning into the risk and beauty of vulnerability. For example, in “How to Live” he explains: “Depravity begins with thinking of love / as a radical act. I quit loving / with difficulty.” Because feeling, and the communication of that feeling, should be easy, as should the desire to communicate what one simply notices. “Look at me looking at you as you look at me,” he says of his beloved, again holding nothing back and demonstrating that rare quality of forthrightness, which quickly endears him to the reader.
And so, “It’s a great twilight for confessing,” he states in “No Rush,” a poem that offers a second, equally persistent theme of the collection, that of slowing down time, particularly the time spent between a father and daughter as they engage in the drama of their everyday affairs—bedtime rituals, episodes of Pokémon, neighborhood walks, and trips to the pool—attending closely to how each other perceives the world because it is just as important to be aware of how others think and feel and to grow inside that intimacy at every turn. What makes these poems especially tender, though, is the way in which Dillard’s sense of witness and connection with his family bears a preemptive energy, love often fearing its inevitable demise, as with the poem, “Lighthouse,” in which the father urgently confesses:
Some nights
this feeling—everything is rushing away.
I’m going to die. I only have
so many pineapples left to shard,
so many nights to soak in the heat of my wife’s back,
to pick up my children, soap their armpits and necks, sing
of tiny girls who live in school walls and ride mice like horses.
That many of these poems are set against the backdrop of the pandemic intensifies this sense of doom and inspires the father to find creative measures to sustain his connections with those he loves. In “Pandemic Fairytale,” for example, reality is transformed into “… a fairy tale wood from [his] daughter’s books, // every ever after page torn out…,” the father attempting to “breadcrumb” a pathway to his children. But we already know how this story ends. As children grow up, they must forge their own path, and here, too, the fairy tale father is left with “…a quiet vining // into a kingdom of sky / that every night after bedtime // [he] climb[s.]”
Interestingly, despite these challenges, total catastrophe never arrives. Rather, all activity culminates in an insistence on change, deviation, and vicissitude, the speaker of “No Rush” offering further qualification:
Last night I dreamed
grief was an unlit room that I had to clean.
Just as I figured out how to navigate its darkness
I put something away and had to learn all over again.
Many of Dillard’s poems leave us with an image of pure potential, a blank slate if you will, and here, the concept of “learning all over again” figures as both a promise of newness and a promise of more—more time, more witness, more marvel. The most potent example of this phenomenon arrives in “Pandemic Dream: Tropical Beach,” in which the daughter figures as “…a line in an unfinished poem,” no longer inaccessible and, instead, full of possibility. “She runs ahead of me and yet is always within reach,” continues the father, reminding us that witness never exhausts itself, nor does the knowledge we might glean from it if we are willing to temper our fear by remaining engaged.
It is no surprise, then, that at the heart of this collection is the speaker’s wish to be worthy of the fearlessness and imagination of his children, particularly his daughter. “I will show you how you can / make a sky out of anything,” he promises, and across these poems, he most certainly does. While the daughter often serves as a tender and patient teacher to her father, “…dispensing wisdom from the high peaks of innocence…” even more beautiful is that she has learned this behavior from him, the father’s insight steadily imprinting itself on the daughter’s psyche, demonstrated by her continuous mirroring of his wordplay and curiosity. We see this explicitly at work in the poem, “Edna,” in which the father explains that “…silverfish / are neither silver nor a fish, but a spoon-dull insect / that loves kitchens bathrooms the mouths of children,” prompting the daughter to affectionately name the pool, “Edna,” and to question “…if Kleenex are used to clean necks.” In this way, imagination grants the father and daughter equal footing in the relationship, both able to delight, reflect, instruct and, through their dynamic, we see that the imagination can be inherited, as well.
The title of the collection places the relationship between the father and daughter in the context of Ragnarök, a mythological sequence of events between the gods and the powers of evil that culminates in the end of the world. Throughout these pages, there is a clear war against time, mortality, and the expiration of love, but the Ragnarök reference makes me wonder if anything will survive amidst the ruin. In this moment, I am reminded of the collection’s opening poem, “Pear Snow,” in which the speaker attempts to describe two-day-old snow, the kind of snow that refuses to dissolve in the aftermath of a heavy storm: a pseudo relic, and in this way, a version of rubble. But here, the speaker keeps this relic alive by granting it a name—“pear snow’’—signaling that what outlasts is an attention to the world through inventions of language, no matter how imperfect those efforts. In “Pandemic Fairy Tale,” the speaker expounds: “…my misunderstanding has turned // into my only way of understanding…” a humble and hopeful means of articulating the well-intentioned gesture that, in every instance, is the imagination.
Fittingly, the final exchange between the father and daughter occurs in the final poem of the collection, “Pandemic Dream: The Book of Gone,” a poem built almost entirely of dialogue, in which the daughter asks her father to share with her the ending of the book they are reading:
And she says what does it say
And I say I don’t know
And she says it’s okay you can say it
So I say her name
And she says my name
I close the book
Although here the book is closed, this poem communicates an endlessness, evidenced through the repetition of “and” as well as the refusal to punctuate the lines. The voices of the father and daughter persist, their names carried forth in the mouth of the other, echoing ad infinitum. The reason for this? The imagination, which bears an incredible stamina, allows the father and daughter to resurrect—to dance again and again through a shared affinity for language—both of them always wanting to know what will happen while also understanding that they already do.
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Todd Dillard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Guernica, and Threepenny Review. His debut collection Ways We Vanish (Okay DonkeyPress) was a finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award. His chapbook Ragnorak at the Father-Daughter Dance is published by Variant Literature. He’s a poetry editor at The Boiler.
Susan L. Leary is a poet, writer, and editor living in Indianapolis, IN. She is the author of four poetry collections: Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, July 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the Louise Bogan Award; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for The Elyse Wolf Prize with Slate Roof Press.
ID: Cover of Ragnorak at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard.
Psaltery & Lyre 