Auguries & Divinations

Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations is based in the practice of augury—symbols of entrapment and escape abound, interspersed with iconic avian poems, such as “Sparrow,” “Heron,” “Hawk,” “Haruspication,” and “Feathered Thing.” “Is it vestigial,” the poet asks, in deft mappings of migration, “this need to tally birds and bells, catalogue / the signs?”

Treseler delights in imaginative recasting: of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, and Gertrude Stein; of the personae of Anne Sexton and Sophia Hawthorne; and of paintings by George Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and William Merritt Chase. For Treseler, vision is fueled by the courage to witness:

[…] surfaces enforce a silence as lethal
as measles—one that […] kept me from
caring too much or saying exactly what I saw.

Throughout, ekphrasis provides a lens into love, art, humanity, and nature. In “Noli me tangere,” viewers gaze, voyeuristically, at Mary Magdalene, “her hidden look […], not admitting our want of her, / our figural third, our portraiture.”

Maternal allusions prevail in this “new philosophy” of motherhood decoupled from biology (“motherhood is not required // to speak a mother tongue”), while declaiming gender essentialism (“Tongue / freed from the ways in which a woman // is made to speak as a body”). Intimate portraits of female friendships culminate, rapturously, in “The Lucie Odes,” a ten-part paean to “[t]wo solitudes / opened to the field and furrow in each other,” eulogizing a woman who embodied self-determination, “owning no one but yourself.” This book’s liberatory and linguistic work of becoming reclaims “the property of the body,” inscribing lives “as free, / as fated as skaters skirting death / above frozen water: what craves flight, / crowning sky. Declaring itself, I.”

Against the circumscriptions of suburban malaise, marriage, and the nuclear family, Treseler offers a protectionary “inlet, island, harbor” in poems suffused with sensual, baroque diction and emancipatory desire, “[m]aking / an eros of pitched precision.” In critiquing the “worn / grooves of instinctual life,” Treseler introduces a new feminist ecriture, a blazing “inner spark” of transcendentalist self-reliance:

I have charted the distant orb that governs
the temperament of oceans, rowdiness
of woodland mammals. I study the event

that is the wind. Mornings, we track prints
in softened earth, collect the salted wood.