Anne Sexton’s home in Newton, Massachusetts, is still standing—a yellow colonial with blue shutters, as visually tidy as ever. As readers know, however, the poet who lived within for more than a decade was far more complicated than the home’s façade suggests, even beyond her legacy as an unbridled mind bristling against the restraints of suburban life.
In her debut collection of poems, Auguries & Divinations (Bauhan, 2024), Heather Treseler turns to Sexton as both a literary ancestor and a geographical one, considering “that old rage for order” (24) in their shared hometown of Newton. Treseler picks up the project of suburban rebellion fluidly in narrative poems, personal and in persona, that bridge the latter half of the twentieth century. These poems encounter the suburban life with humor and skepticism, celebrating the potential for connections made within and despite their orderly setting, where “the point is / repetition” (28). Instead, the suburbs offer a stretched canvas across which Treseler’s portraits of ordinary lives expand.
Treseler is a gifted formal poet, and this collection is deeply invested in honoring the varied forms of literary inheritance. The poems inhabit a New England outside of time, in which “a sexton peals chords / of evensong” as residents return from work (21). The neighborhoods themselves, with wry humor, take on the characteristics of their inhabitants, as “each squat house in our street’s / orb eyed the others, envious” (24). Beneath the looks, glares, and glances lie the ripples of deep destruction: from sexual predation to the enormous threat of genius unexpressed and unrecognized. (This includes the intriguing poems relating Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin’s friendship and daily phone calls.) Treseler’s careful inquest considers how these lives were possible, with attention to the material affordances, back porches and telephones, that allowed poetry and motherhood to coexist.
Among my favorite poems, however, are those that reach beyond Newton, like the rapturous sequence “The Lucie Odes.” As the poems travel farther afield—to St. Louis and to erotic heights—they venture into intellectual companionship, love, and, at times, into grief for potential lives not lived. In the pairing with Lucie, particularly, the speaker finds, “Two solitudes / opened to the field and furrow in each other” (39). Perhaps the most expansive meditation on what this might mean comes in the capacious “Factories at Clichy,” in which the speaker and a companion mirror a scene as they stand before the titular painting:
How Van Gogh’s lovers, narrow and undefined,
clutch each other as if at sole possessions, released
from assembly lines to this unruly field of wild
rye, long-haired rue: meadow of another age
I might have walked with you.
(47)
Art and writing, in these poems, are the conduits beyond the “assembly lines” of everyday life and into a series of expanding possibilities. Treseler conveys the risk of a life contained as an artistic loss—“a painting, unimagined, // of unspent color and light” (67). In these poems, Treseler warns us to spend and savor it all.
