From award-winning poet and author of Crow-Work, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary. The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird’s flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature’s smallest details: a lizard’s quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail’s shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful ways, as Pankey scrutinizes the physical for meaning, and that meaning for truth. With uncommon grace, each of Pankey’s precise lyrics advances our shared ontological questions and expresses our deepest contradictions. In a world of mystery, should we focus on finding meaning or creating it? How can the known—and the unknown— be captured in language? Augury is a masterful and magical collection from a poet of stirring intelligence, “a book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.” Praise for Augury “A darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power.” —Kathy Fagan, author of Moving & St. Rage “This is a book I will keep close at hand, alongside the best work of Montale, Dickinson, Celan, and Stevens. This is a book one will turn to again and again.” —Rebecca Dunham, author of Cold Pastoral “Each ethereal image he weaves into his work is delicately curated, whittled down through his attention to sound. . . . Pankey’s poems destabilize as they straddle time and place, and he looks askance at the narrow way in which language is often viewed.” —Publishers Weekly

Roman Republican Augury: Freedom and Control proposes a new way of understanding augury, a form of Roman state divination designed to consult the god Jupiter. Previous scholarly studies of augury have tended to focus either upon its legal-constitutional effects or upon its role in maintaining and perpetuating Roman social and political structures. This volume makes a new contribution to the study of Roman religion, politics, and cultural history by focusing instead upon what augury can tell us about how Romans understood their relationship with their gods. Augury is often thought to have told Romans what they wanted to hear. This volume argues that augury left space for perceived expressions of divine will which contradicted human wishes, and that its rules and precepts did not permit human beings to create or ignore signs at will. This analysis allows the Jupiter whom Romans approached in augury to emerge as not simply a source of power to be channelled to human ends, but a person with his own interests and desires, which did not always overlap with those of his human enquirers. When human will and divine will clashed, it was the will of Jupiter which was supposed to prevail. In theory as in practice, it was the Romans, not their supreme god, who were bound by the auguries and auspices.

t'ai freedom ford's second collection of poems is direct, ingenious, vibrant, alive, queer, and BLACK. & more black won the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry in 2020 and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

This book is superb. Full of the knowledge that every self-respecting Pagan and Occultist needs to know. You are strongly advised to buy this book. Highly recommended. Touchstone Examines in detail the interpretation of birds as auguries & omens, the mythology of birds (Roman, Greek, Celtic & Teutonic), the folklore & weather lore associated with them, their use in heraldry & falconry & their appearances in folk songs & poetry. The book explores these areas in a general way, then goes into specific details of individual birds from the albatross to the yellowhammer, including exotic & even mythical birds.

A 12-year-old boy, mourning the death of his mother, takes refuge in the myths and fairytales she always loved--and finds that his reality and a fantasy world start to meld.

We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come ... the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet's last act, Hélène Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book--and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most delightful, in its exposure of the seams of her extraordinary craft, We Defy Augury finds the reader among familiar faces. In these pages we encounter Eve, the indomitable mother; Jacques Derrida, the faithful friend; children, neighbors; and always the literary forebears: Montaigne, Diderot, Proust, and, in one moving passage, Erich Maria Remarque. We Defy Augury moves easily from Cixous's Algerian childhood, to Bacharach in the Rhineland, to, eerily, the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center, in the year 2000. In one of the most astonishing passages in this tour-de-force performance of the art of digression, Cixous proclaims: "My books are free in their movements and in their choice of routes [...] They are the product of many makers, dreamed, dictated, cobbled together." This unique experience, which could only have come from the pen of Cixous, is now available in English, and readers are sure to delight in this latest work by one of France's most celebrated writer-philosophers.

Roman Republican Augury: Freedom and Control proposes a new way of understanding augury, a form of Roman state divination designed to consult the god Jupiter. Previous scholarly studies of augury have tended to focus either upon its legal-constitutional effects or upon its role in maintaining and perpetuating Roman social and political structures. This volume makes a new contribution to the study of Roman religion, politics, and cultural history by focusing instead upon what augury can tell us about how Romans understood their relationship with their gods. Augury is often thought to have told Romans what they wanted to hear. This volume argues that augury left space for perceived expressions of divine will which contradicted human wishes, and that its rules and precepts did not permit human beings to create or ignore signs at will. This analysis allows the Jupiter whom Romans approached in augury to emerge as not simply a source of power to be channelled to human ends, but a person with his own interests and desires, which did not always overlap with those of his human enquirers. When human will and divine will clashed, it was the will of Jupiter which was supposed to prevail. In theory as in practice, it was the Romans, not their supreme god, who were bound by the auguries and auspices.