Auguries & Divinations
By Heather Treseler,
Bauhan Publishing,
2024, 120 pages
$18.00
Heather Treseler’s debut poetry collection, Auguries & Divinations, which won the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, takes as its cover, Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters and a Bird Trap.” This painting ostensibly depicts villagers in a winter scene, and a city beyond the background. Upon closer inspection, these skating villagers are part of a larger story. The painting speaks to our deeper souls (birds) and how those souls might be trapped in something so innocuous as a home (nest.) Just as Brueghel excavates the deeper village scene within this art, Treseler exposes the perdition that we, particularly we women, know as suburban life. In her opening poem, “Ghostology,” Treseler lets us in on the rule of the suburbia’s underworld,
The first rule here is not to disturb the peace
or permit parking, the right to quiet enjoyment
of sprinklers and playsets, gas grills and badminton,
swinger clubs and pervy sex.
I am a nurse, so my frame of reference for a cul-de-sac is a blind pouch or a diverticulum. The poem “Cul-de-sac” is a more intentional blockage:
Each squat house in our street’s orb
eyed the others, envious of another’s paint job, carport, or owner.Left alone, I built model planes with torn-pocket parachutes. Rode
a blue scooter in dizzying loops of the prescribed circle. Adultsacted as if living here were preferred or exalted. But I had looked it
up: I knew it meant bottom of the sack, the fate of drowned catsa sickly child or rabbit. Gathered up, held head-down in a satchel
or bucket. When the hands closed in, I’d make a run for it.
The second section of this book takes place long past the cul-de-sac of the poet’s childhood. True to her word, Treseler did make a run for it, or shall we say, she grew up and became a professor. Her sequence, “The Lucie Odes,” was written after the death of her dear friend Lucie Nell Beaudet, whom Treseler met after Beaudet enrolled as a student in Tresler’s writing class at Washington University. Treseler had previously written about a silence between women. But, this relationship allowed a claiming of a voice between women. “Two solitudes/ opened to the field and furrow in each other.”
The armor of amour propre donned, as adults,
learning self-regard as if paint-by-number.
We talked Heidegger. Blared the Pogues whilethe tabby cat hid in the closet, and we poured
each other nightcaps: two women determined
not to fear living, the alphabetic rune of scars.
I too have been blessed by a since departed Lucie who was part mentor, part spirit guide. That friend’s personal history astounded me, and made it possible for us both to be seen. Though a book review does not afford space to delve into Lucie Nell Beaudet’s personal history, Treseler does so in this ode. This tender disclosure of Beaudet’s story, accomplished in dynamic, precise and surprising tercets, highlights the poet’s skill, compassion, and vulnerability. It is this section of the book in which the home no longer exists as a place. Home is no longer a street, a cul-de-sac or neighborhood, but is love’s estate.
According to Treseler, childhood is a “cold planet warmed by women.” Maternal figures and mothers populate the verse throughout the book from the moment we learn that “The first empire is mother” until the closing poems where we discover that “motherhood is not required/to speak a mother tongue.”
This extraordinary collection allows us to know the vulnerable child and young adult, her intelligence and resilience. We grow with the poet to a place beyond where we are “Not women,/ wary of their own extinction. Not a painting unimagined,/ of unspent color and light.”
Dear Reader, I urge you to read Auguries & Divinations. Experience not only a fine debut collection, but a textured and accomplished book that claims its place in the masterful canon of modern poetry.
Eileen Cleary earned an MFA at Lesley University and is a candidate for a second MFA at Solstice. She co-founded the Lilly Salon of Needham and is a recent Pushcart nominee. Her work is published or forthcoming at Apeiron, Naugatuck River Review, The Main Street Rag and The American Journal of Poetry.
