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I have been a Board Member of the New England Poetry Club for a few years now; and I remember judging our Motton Book Prize with other board members. When we came to discuss Heather Treseler’s poetry collection, Auguries & Divinations there was a hands down love for the book. We were impressed with her facility with language, the music of her work and the deep layers of the lines in this insightful new collection. So after she won the Award, I decided to interview the author, and she generously agreed.

From her website:

“Auguries & Divinations tracks a young woman’s coming of age, attuned to the unspoken liabilities in women’s lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. An older woman becomes the narrator’s Beatrice in love and survival, and she returns to the New England of her childhood ready to claim a life of her own making, drawing on the classical practice of augury, or observing birds to discern human fate.​”

Heather Treseler

Auguries & Divinations received the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize (Bauhan), and the 2024 Shelia Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. It’s been reviewed in the Boston Globe, the Poetry Foundation, LitHub, On the Seawall, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Worcester Magazine, and it’s available directly from Bauhan and at many independent bookstores.”

Doug Holder: Your poetry explores “the suburban underworld.” I remember an image from the movie Blue Velvet by David Lynch. Lynch pans on the broad lawns of suburbia, and then goes below them, to show us the savagery of insects, etc., below the benign green carpet. Do you feel in some way you are doing the same thing?

Heather Treseler: I hadn’t thought of that before, but I think the David Lynch analogy is a very canny one.

I am interested in the suburbs as a material enactment of American ideals – pastoral, economic, familial, and social – and as a geography in which appearances and realities often collide. I was ten years old when my family moved from a triple decker in Hyde Park to a rundown Victorian in an upper-class suburb. We were outsiders, strivers, and as a newcomer (and later as a neighborhood babysitter), I started picking up on notes of disorder beneath rigorously maintained surfaces, the human complexities and unmet hungers behind façades of contentment and domestic tranquility.

As an adolescent, I felt like an amateur anthropologist, observing the lives around me, particularly the lives of girls and women, and I was discomforted by some of the compromises and even privations and wrongdoing that I saw. The suburbs enact an ethos of privacy, property, and propriety, but also surveillance, exclusion, and exploitation, which can serve to hide shocking goings-on. I was interested in the wildness that persisted underneath all that orderliness, and I felt I had to understand that tension if I was going to construct a life that met my hungers and desire for certain kinds of freedom.

DH: An older woman, Lucie, becomes a guide for your narrator – a sort of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Why did you choose to have a guide or mentor to traverse the narrator through the rocky shoals of your old neighborhood?

HT: The Lucie Odes are about an historical person: the second section of the book details a narrator’s friendship with Lucie Nell Beaudet (1960-2018) in St. Louis, Missouri, while the narrator is in graduate school and, in other important ways, acquiring her life education. Lucie, who enacted a “Great Gatsby” climb in her life from an early abusive marriage and a terrible car wreck to a life of professional attainment, friendship, and fulfillment, shows the narrator– through her love and guidance– a path to her own agency and freedom.

DH: You use birds in some of your poems. Birds are frequently used as symbols in art to express human-animal connection; human hopes; spiritual beliefs; and wealth, power and colonialism, and extinction. Their use as symbols can be seen in the earliest known art (the Lascaux Caves), and their use as symbols persists to the present moment. There was a harrowing poem about a hawk devouring another bird, or a heron snapping up a sun-dazed fish, etc. I think you embrace the beauty and ugliness of nature, and ourselves. Your take?

HT: The “auguries” in my book title refers to the ancient Roman practice of making important political decisions– about the timing of battles, elections, and state proceedings – in connection with priests’ interpretations of birds in flight, their appearance in certain regions of the sky, their wings’ speed and noise, their feeding patterns, and even the appearance of avian entrails. Consulting natural signs to discern human fate seemed a good metaphor for the narrator’s search for insight into the truer nature of her surroundings.

I’ve also always loved Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls in which Nature defends a female eagle (or formel)’s right to choose (or abstain from choosing) a mate, upholding free will in the harmonious conduct of life, as well as the humorous role of the pet sparrow in Catullus’s love poems for Clodia.

So yes, the birds in Auguries & Divinations are polyvalent symbols for the realities of appetite and survival but also of pleasure, free will, and dialects of song.

DH: You won the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Award. You have had any number of honors. What is special about this award?

HT: The New England Poetry Club is one of the oldest, most active organizations of its kind. Since Auguries & Divinations is a coming-of-age collection set here in New England, it’s a special honor to have it recognized in its place of origin by a civic organization that has advocated for the work of New England poets for over a century.

DH: Why should we read your book?

HT: I am not sure anyone should read my book, but I hope those that do might find it pleasurable: that it rewards their attention with stories and images they find useful and moving; that it might help them see the landscape of everyday life in new ways. I don’t know that a poet can hope for more than that.

— Heather Treseler