The Hatchet Sun by Victoria Dym

In her debut full-length collection, Ms. Dym feeds us stories of love, laughter, and food itself, food is love / love is food, juxtaposed in stark contrast to the often-shocking tragedies that inhabit the human condition. For example, amidst the decadence and pampering of a mother-daughter Christmas Eve, we find a man / in shadow / beds down / blankets on the concrete sidewalk.  Themes of longing, impermanence, brokenness, loss, grief, and death echo throughout this poignant work.  We are invited into secret places where treasures are kept: a lock of baby’s curls; a dead mother’s rings. The poet asks:  Is anybody watching me? Can you see me?  Do you hear me? And says outright: I am singing to you. Indeed, the poet sings of nature, both the beautiful and the brutal and we, like the millipede in her kitchen, climb on the wall to observe as human and animal lives mingle. This hybrid-form writing begins in a kind of staccato like stand-up, like the news and with the poet, we are drawn into the possibility of what’s around the next corner. There exist, also in contrast to such staccato, beautifully crafted lines: the holiness of time, the holiness of place / morning’s fog, laced veil. & in the end, the poet honor[s her] own smallness with a graceful bow as she tells us: I bear within me, deep / my own ocean of swirling silence.

 –d. ellis phelps, poet, editor, author, of failure & faith, (Kelsay Books, 2023)

The Hatchet Sun is like cutting into light the way one slices into a summer fruit. There can’t help but be sweet juice dripping. In these poems Victoria Dym writes with all the senses leaning into sensuality by skillfully mixing and remixing the language of life, love and grief. These poems move seamlessly from human, to animal, to nature and back using facts, tenderness and humor. The images twist and turn to create a new way of seeing. The overall breath of this gorgeous work speaks of achievement and celebration in the midst of a melancholy as Victoria writes in the poem “Mermaid,” I am singing to you this mermaid’s dream—to shed these scales, to trust my legs—to walk onto the land, upright, drenched—to wrap my siren thighs with yours. I am singing to you. This kind of sensual awareness walks the thin line between real and possible. This is Victoria’s charm and ability to create a two-toned consciousness which makes each poem extend the reach of reality.

–Sheila Carter-Jones, author of Three Birds Deep, Naomi Madgett Book Award

The prose poems in ‘The Hatchet Sun’ took my breath away. Violence, avoidance, and dysfunction abound in such works as ‘History’, but the prose itself lingers in the mind as pure poetry. An alternative view of Dym’s vision is presented in her sensuously explored visual images and sounds, and the satisfactions of maternal feeling, with reference to her daughter, as ‘my very best work’. The father monolith rears his head from time to time in this brimming and varied collection, and a wise poet like Dym recognises the role of generation and inheritance. Life is a camouflage of colour and shade in the poem ‘When the Octopus Dreams’, and we, like the multi-brained, three-hearted octopus, are pulled into our emotional colors according to experience. The writer enquires ‘Am I changing color?’ and the burden of obligation demands that this beautiful poem conclude with the instinctive longing ‘If only I had another brain, another heart, an extra arm’.

The collection includes poems of desire, and a stomach ‘fills with several hundred chrysalises . . . & moths spill from my lips . . .’ This is where Dym triumphs, in her evocation of what is lost forever but which may at times be tremulously attained again. There is a delicacy to such work, a wistfulness light as a door knocker lifted up by the wind.

This sensuous and unashamedly intellectual poet brings gifts of authority to her work, which presents itself here as achieved, memorable and entirely compelling. As a bulwark against changing times, poems such as Love Opus 18 for the Bassoon show the full scope of a journey characterised by curiosity and the writer’s own sense of her (and by inference our) place in the cosmos. In such a cosmos, math, music, and history coalesce quite magnificently. A collection to be savoured.

–Mary O’Donnell, poet, novelist, short-story writer, Massacre of the Birds (Salmon, 2020)