Commentary on my poetry

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Suspend the machinations of your mind and open wide the portals of your heart and imagination when reading the creations of poet, Victoria Twomey. It is possible that each reading of her work will bring you gifts, pleasure and when you least expect it, compelling surprises. 

Her brilliant still-life images such as “a pink angel with a broken wing atop a music box,” and “a scratched and faded color polaroid,” that appears in The Passenger’s Remains, a recent work, reminded me in vivid detail and affection of souvenirs and keepsakes my parents had scattered about my childhood home, along with the melancholy accompanying the memories of unasked questions or unspoken sentiments to a departed loved one.  

In Inheritance, from her book, “Glimpse,” I was struck by the vulnerability inherent in the passion, tenderness and sensuality issuing forth from the biological reality of a body’s journey through time, accompanied by a human being’s never-ending longing for physical, spiritual, and emotional love.

Much like the writings of Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, Mary Oliver, Victoria will often take a reader by surprise with a clever or even amorous, but always meaningful, knockout punch near the end of one of her gems. From her poem, Unfolding, involving scenes contained in a few folded-up pictures that depict many events, decisions, questions, heartbreaks, and memories that can flow through a person’s lifetime, she ends with a searching and deeply meaningful question for any human being to ask of themselves.

This is what great art can gift any observer willing to fully absorb the creative expression and virtuosity of the artist. With the inventiveness, vision and imagination of a multi-talented artist, Victoria’s creations inform, entertain and touch deeply anyone willing to take in her work. Her poems may even astonish a person by taking them into their long-forgotten past where painful or even wonderful memories are retrieved, giving the reader the opportunity for an entirely new and life-giving interpretation. Her poems stayed with me long after the initial reading, inviting me to go back to many of them multiple times for a deeper understanding as well as for the pleasure they bring. 

~John R. Daubney 

Author of Those Who Walk with Fire:

Everyday People Discuss the Passion that Fuels Their Extraordinary Lives

“A New Day for Mr. Death”The poet addresses a personified death, depicted with wonderful macabre imagery, and triumphs over it. The poem ends on a hopeful and beautiful note. This was really enjoyable and original a treatment of the subject and the hope to escape its clutches.
“Questions for the Dead”The theme of dying is visited using questions from the inner-most heart, a favorite is. “in the arms of a precious lover beneath an antique moon?” The final couplet uses left behind possessions to evoke the sadness of the loss. A poem that I felt as I read it.  

In “Glimpse,” the title poem of her new collection, Victoria Twomey calls for us to pause, “share this momentary clarity” and assures us this will reveal “something calm and true.” As we read, we come to trust her to provide at least a glimpse of what might be better in us, and in our world. Though the poet knows the world can sometimes be hard or dark, she always retains faith in the beauty of it, and us. Twomey is an accomplished visual artist, who makes many beautiful things. Here, she makes new ones, but out of words. The poems in Glimpse will engage you and leave you hopeful, even if you had thought hope was in short supply. — Alan Walowitz, author, The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems

As benefits a collection of poems by a poet who is also a painter, a collection aptly titled Glimpse, these poems are visual pieces filled with stars, with birds (and other things that fly including dragonflies and shamans), with fish, the sea, with memories and prayers, and the magical images of a woman in love. There is even a glimpse of “a woman, painting a woman… she paints the light illuminating a garden.” Step into that light and catch a glimpse of what poet/painter Victoria Twomey sees.— Dan Wilcox, Poet & Peace Activist, runs the Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center in Albany, NY

At the parlor, the haunting and haunted speaker of these poems receives a velvet sack with “an unexpected weight of bone and ash.” In time she will learn to live with the memory of her father singing, her father distilled into dust. This is just one of many compelling glimpses Victoria Twomey gifts her readers in these poems composed with pigments and brush strokes of a painter, these paintings seen and reproduced on the canvas of the page.— Indran Amirthanayagam, publisher Beltway Editions, author, Ten Thousand Steps Against The Tyrant