Fairy tales and fables — from Cinderella and The Little Mermaid to Possession and Jane Eyre — especially those involving girls and women, are full of augury. Of premonition. Divination. In Hansel & Gretel, the selfish mother who cannot feed herself and sends her daughter and son into the forest so there are fewer mouths to feed foreshadows the wicked witch whose Candy House of horrors lures the hungry children. The pregnant mother in Rapunzel who is so obsessed with her own hunger that she’s complicit in bartering off her firstborn to a crone presages said crone’s selfish possessiveness in carrying the girl off at puberty to seclusion in a tower to preserve her virtue. One thinks of the old tree struck in twain by lightning at Thornfield, signal to the dear Reader that Jane Eyre’s notions of what is true and promising in Mr. Rochester’s love will be violently challenged. And of course, women and augury abound in Greek and Roman mythology — Aphrodite’s dove, for example, or Minerva’s owl — or are even themselves portentous bird-women, across cultures, in creatures such as harpies and sirens, siren and kinnara. Likewise, tales of pilgrimage (which might be sub-genre of the fairy tale or fable) are full of cautionary signals and omens.
Heather Treseler’s debut collection of poems, Auguries & Divinations, recipient of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, is not a fairy tale, but it does track a female speaker’s complex journey from the circumstances of her birth family through a kind of “second birth” in a relationship with a maternal figure/sister/lover/friend in early adulthood, and finally moving into the terrain of mature erotic and reciprocal romantic love annealed by the lessons in grief, loss, and compromises she has endured along the way. This “progress” or pilgrimage has a talismanic, sometimes formidable maternal energy at its core (“The first empire is mother,” Treseler writes in “Purpura”), and so perhaps it makes sense that the poems are also profoundly concerned with myths of femininity and sexuality, carceral impediment, empire, labor, suburban (and other domestically and culturally prescribed) exigencies, fertility, and the seemingly “magical thinking” by which women can grow into themselves despite systematic obstacles, whether societal or self-imposed.
Any book of poems, but perhaps especially a first book, can be hard to organize. The material has often been written over a period of years and passed through various influential experiences and stylistic phases. If the book is conceptual, it can often seem overtly deliberate or too programmatic in it design; if it brings together disparate or loosely thematic poems, the arrangement can feel a bit random. There is much to consider. Should there be titles? Sections? Titled sections? Epigraphs? A “lobby poem” or preface? A coda? Should there be “notes”? One obvious structure for a “coming of age” collection is to proceed chronologically from poems of early life to poems of later life. To some extent, Treseler does this, though there is nothing plodding or predictable about the movement of this journey. Paid out in four sections, the book’s sojourn feels less linear or chronologically plotted than it feels curated in a way that resonates with what writer and scholar of fairy tales and fables Marina Warner says about her own library:
“I do cluster things. It’s largely associative. But I was influenced, early on, by the organization of the Warburg Library. Aby Warburg [the German art historian] had a particular idea of how the library should mirror the life of a concept. So it begins with the foundational text at the bottom, the original material from which many things spring. Then there’s the imagery associated with it on the next floor. The end is action: what effects in the world this concept might have had. Broadly speaking, if you took the Iliad, you would find different editions of the poem at the bottom, and then representations and interpretations of it. And then, on the top floor, you’d have what the work has wrought: history, battles, ideals of heroism, ideals of gods and goddesses in the world, and so forth.”
I would suggest that the “foundational texts” for this book (the “concept” of which might be considered female agency and creativity) are found in parts one and two. In part one, we find origin stories, in which the speaker explores her own haunted legacy of femininity and power in poems about her mother’s precarious domestic circumstances and illness, mostly in a suburban context often highlighted by shout-outs to the rebellious poet Anne Sexton, “edging to break loose” as a person and a poet despite the “rectangular fashion, by right angles” of her repressed suburban life. In section one, the speaker also explores her own childhood experienced in a titular cul-de-sac (“I knew it meant bottom of the sack, the fate of drowned cats, // a 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”).
Treseler goes on to explore that “run for it” in section two, comprised chiefly of a long poem in sections called “The Lucie Odes,” an elegy for an older woman, a former “adult” student become conspirator, confidante, friend, and lover. The sequence pays homage to a woman who has endured emotionally and literally crippling abuse (domestic, a terrible physical accident) to go on, nonetheless, to become a scientist and budding writer. As teacher and student become close, the latter helps the former through an especially tough and emotionally punishing relationship of her own. “We dreamt of a love outside of propriety / rights, the subtle tyranny in the habendum / clause, ‘to have and to hold,’ in the contracts // for land and slave, water rights and wives.” The personal love relationship between Lucie and the speaker in the poem is played out over other abuses and travesties — the death of “unarmed Michael Brown,” for example — and then survives separation by geographical distance and death of the beloved Lucie (“oh woman more than mother or lover and both”), leading the speaker to acknowledge her preceptor’s proud and victorious striding (with a nod to earlier feminist Adrienne Rich) “[out] from that steaming wreck: leggy, lone, owning no one but yourself.”
Through these foundational texts of personal becoming, Treseler brings us to Warner’s “next floor,” where she explores, in section three, through imagery and personae associated with her origin material — Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Emily Dickinson, and a host of auspicious birds (starlings, sparrows, a heron — the right “to claim, as inalienable, // the property of the body. If pleasure / is a barter, let the reach of its horizon / be one’s own,” from “Everyone in me is a bird,” a title taken from Anne Sexton’s “In Celebration of My Uterus.” Treseler’s poem concludes with an allusion to the book’s cover:
… Consider Bruegel’s
Winter Landscape with Skaters
and Bird Trap, where the starlings
are not ornaments but gravities —
as live as Sexton was once, as free,
as fated as skaters skirting death
above frozen water: what craves flight,
crowning sky. Declaring itself, I.
Section three concludes with a poem about the complexity of motherhood, written for a friend who is eight months pregnant when her mother enters hospice for palliative care, a poem about being caught between “two shores …: the woman who bore you, daughter / you will bear, your body a hinge between its history // and future, an imperfect present tense.” By this point in the collection, through poems like “Nullipara,” the reader senses that although notions of motherhood are crucial to this poet’s identity, the speaker herself will likely not bear a child (“Mother a river, / inexhaustible as water; a song of warmth and warning; / a map for the body, politic; a long cobbled road, umbilical, / built to outlast wreck and ruin, the death of empire”), something the speaker confirms in section four, the “top floor” of her “library,” in which we see “what the work [of her hard-won experience] has wrought.”
And what indeed has arisen from the book’s grapplings with loss and grief? For one thing: a life replete with ardent reciprocal erotic love “and my equal need for freedom.” a relationship without fantasy but rife with full-on physical desire. In “Petrichor,” she writes of her lover,
You are not a mirage in an old Western, an isle of green
in a desiccated desert. You are not a Christological cactus.
You do not ride a horse or hobby-horse, parading manliness.
But long and cool, like gin on ice, this permission to need,
to covet the salve of another’s skin,
to hanker after wild scent as it’s released from the resin of rock —
You offered me your mouth,
and I could barely stop for air.
Treseler finds parallel narratives of female agency and desire in poems about Clodia (object of Catullus’s ardor) and Sophia Hawthorne (wife of Nathaniel), but the most striking of these poems in section four concern the speaker and her own erotic and creative awakening, an argument of “irony versus tenderness” explored in pieces like the masterful five-part poem, “Silver Lake.” Having passed through the thickets of mourning and bewilderment the reader encounters in the book’s earlier sections, our pilgrim has found a love equal to her powerful need for connection and for independence, a relationship all the more believable for ongoing challenges. In the poem’s second section, Treseler writes,
… That winter, we had learned there
would be no child and a door shut
with finality. The future carried
no blend of our faces, high arches,
knock-knees, dark eyes, your or my
unruly burr of hair. Yet now we saw
children everywhere. They lacquered
us like waves of glass, mirrors of lack.
But to live is not to garner all you desire,
to roil in your own narrow shell, hard limits
of the actual. Might this sorrow improve
us? Chasten our complacence, startle
settled assumptions? Around or beyond
this absence, might we reach nearer to
each other, shorn of ready-made future?
We ached, without irony or answer.
As the book draws to a close, Treseler revisits the suburban landscape of her childhood but no longer feels drawn into or trapped by its codes of comportment. Heading home through streets of outdoor barbecues in “Labor Day,” the speaker says,
… I have no daughter, no son, some might say
no sum to show for my day’s math.
How I’ve sought to add or, just as carefully, subtract. There is license
in a life that appears less, its deepest cares never turned to work,
with a lover who is not my co-investor or delivery service. So I wave,
to be friendly, at the block party rave and seek out my beloved
who sits reading at dusk, awaiting the company of my lust,
patient as a myth or river, ambling south.
If there is a happily ever after in this book’s tale of trial and fulfillment, it is one “without irony or answer.” Born first “to a mother, then to a lover,” the speaker has, finally, saved herself with the realization, as she writes in “Postscript,” that “I see now that motherhood is not required // to speak a mother tongue. A lover tongue. Tongue / freed from ways in which a woman // is made to speak as a body.” In her Introduction to The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar writes that the “real magic of the fairy tale lies in its ability to extract pleasure from pain,” noting that the earliest, primal tales were orally transmitted and meant to be appropriated and transformed by new story tellers in a manner that recalls Marina Warner’s notion of a library of core texts that are the inspiration for the generation of new material. “And from the tangle of that talk and chitchat,” she goes on, “we begin to define our own values, desires, appetites, and aspirations, creating identities that will allow us to produce happily-ever-after endings for ourselves,” which is just one achievement of Heather Treseler’s remarkable personal and poetic sojourn in Auguries & Divinations.
[Published by Bauhan Publishing on April 10, 2024, 105 pages, $18.00 paperback]