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Native Guard: Poems
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—--where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. The title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause. The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey’s life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.
64 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2006
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About the author
Natasha Trethewey
41 books782 followersNatasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
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August 4, 2017
Natasha Trethewey is the southern born daughter of an African American mother and white father at a time when such relations were illegal. Her parents were married in Canada and lived for a time in California, but the pull of the south brought them home. Yet, racism reared its ugly head and the couple divorced, but not before molding a daughter who would later go on to be named Poet Laureate of the United States. Today, Trethewey is a professor of creative writing at Emory University. Her poetry collection Native Guard which speaks of the history of life in the south won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007 and is indeed a powerful collection.
Trethewey divides her slim yet poignant volume of poetry into three sections. The first and third sections speak of the modern state of affairs in Mississippi, focusing on her parents' marriage and divorce and also the relationships that Trethewey had with various neighbors in her community, which were undoubtedly effected by the fact that Trethewey was mixed race. She begins the collection with a poem titled The Southern Cresecent which describes her mother's journey to California by train. At age sixteen she was escaping a south where she had no future and practiced meeting her future husband by staring at his photograph. Later, a young Natasha travels by train with her mother to meet her father. She writes, "I don't recall how she must have held me, how her face sank as she realized, again, the uncertainty of it all-- that trip, too, gone wrong." Trethewey speaks of the courage it took for her mother to live as an African American woman in the south, and these reflections are evident in much of her writing.
In addition to paying homage to her courageous mother, the second section honors the Native Guard of Louisiana and Mississippi, freed slaves who fought for the union army during the civil war. In Pilgrimage she speaks of the ghosts of history in Vicksburg and how they rear their head even today. Her powerful title poem Native Guard begins with a quote from Frederick Douglass. Trethewey then details the war from the perspective of freed slaves from late 1862 through 1865. By February of 1863, they knew it was their "duty now to keep white men as prisoners- rebel soldiers, would-be masters...still they are wary of a negro writing, taking down letters." The Native Guard served in the army at a danger to themselves, and Trethewey captures their feeling with poignant words. She ends the section by returning to cotton, "where another veteran toils, his hands the color of dark soil," showing that unfortunately slavery still exists in all but name, despite the courage of those like the native guard.
Trethewey finishes her volume with odes to her mother like "Miscegenation" which speaks of the danger a mixed race couple faced in the south. Subsequent poems as "My Mother Dreams Another Country," "Blond," and "Southern Gothic" talk of the danger a mixed race couple dealt with on a daily basis, especially when raising children. Trethewey's own parents eventually divorced and, after reading her words, I am left wondering if hearing their daughter called names like mongrel, half breed, and zebra had anything to do with their decision. Each poem is more powerful than the next and contain the common theme of racism in the south long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Prior to this year, I was not a big reader of poetry. Yet, poems open the window to the writer's soul and speak much of human emotions. When I took on a personal challenge of reading a minimum of twenty Pulitzer winners a year, I decided to include poetry. Natasha Trethewey's poetry tells much of life in the south and is worthy of both the Pulitzer and position as Poet Laureate. Her poems are a powerful five star read, and I look forward to reading her other volumes of work.
Trethewey divides her slim yet poignant volume of poetry into three sections. The first and third sections speak of the modern state of affairs in Mississippi, focusing on her parents' marriage and divorce and also the relationships that Trethewey had with various neighbors in her community, which were undoubtedly effected by the fact that Trethewey was mixed race. She begins the collection with a poem titled The Southern Cresecent which describes her mother's journey to California by train. At age sixteen she was escaping a south where she had no future and practiced meeting her future husband by staring at his photograph. Later, a young Natasha travels by train with her mother to meet her father. She writes, "I don't recall how she must have held me, how her face sank as she realized, again, the uncertainty of it all-- that trip, too, gone wrong." Trethewey speaks of the courage it took for her mother to live as an African American woman in the south, and these reflections are evident in much of her writing.
In addition to paying homage to her courageous mother, the second section honors the Native Guard of Louisiana and Mississippi, freed slaves who fought for the union army during the civil war. In Pilgrimage she speaks of the ghosts of history in Vicksburg and how they rear their head even today. Her powerful title poem Native Guard begins with a quote from Frederick Douglass. Trethewey then details the war from the perspective of freed slaves from late 1862 through 1865. By February of 1863, they knew it was their "duty now to keep white men as prisoners- rebel soldiers, would-be masters...still they are wary of a negro writing, taking down letters." The Native Guard served in the army at a danger to themselves, and Trethewey captures their feeling with poignant words. She ends the section by returning to cotton, "where another veteran toils, his hands the color of dark soil," showing that unfortunately slavery still exists in all but name, despite the courage of those like the native guard.
Trethewey finishes her volume with odes to her mother like "Miscegenation" which speaks of the danger a mixed race couple faced in the south. Subsequent poems as "My Mother Dreams Another Country," "Blond," and "Southern Gothic" talk of the danger a mixed race couple dealt with on a daily basis, especially when raising children. Trethewey's own parents eventually divorced and, after reading her words, I am left wondering if hearing their daughter called names like mongrel, half breed, and zebra had anything to do with their decision. Each poem is more powerful than the next and contain the common theme of racism in the south long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Prior to this year, I was not a big reader of poetry. Yet, poems open the window to the writer's soul and speak much of human emotions. When I took on a personal challenge of reading a minimum of twenty Pulitzer winners a year, I decided to include poetry. Natasha Trethewey's poetry tells much of life in the south and is worthy of both the Pulitzer and position as Poet Laureate. Her poems are a powerful five star read, and I look forward to reading her other volumes of work.
April 17, 2025
If you ever take on an American reading project that includes entries from all 50 states, you might want to consider this your selection for Mississippi.
I’m not sure that any writer has ever inspired me to feel like I understand the state better than I currently do, nor has one caused me to reflect on such devotion and confusion for loving such a complicated place.
Here, the Mississippi carved
its mud-dark path, a graveyard
for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
Here, the river changed its course,
turning away from the city,
as one turns, forgetting, from the past--
If you aren’t an American and/or you aren’t familiar with the state of Mississippi, it is a Southern state, and one that has struggled with deep socioeconomic burdens, low public school funding, and a long legacy of racism.
I don’t think that anyone’s going to argue with me when I declare that William Faulkner is the most famous writer ever to hail from that place, and I can tell you, with a decent amount of confidence, that he would have loved this Pulitzer winning collection of Natasha Trethewey’s.
I was not familiar with Ms. Trethewey’s poetry before NATIVE GUARD, nor was I familiar with her backstory: she was the daughter of a Black woman (a social worker) and a white man (a poet and professor) in Mississippi, in the 1960s, then the step-daughter to an abusive man who went on to murder her mother when she was 19.
Ms. Trethewey is a gifted poet who is blessed with both the technical prowess needed to tackle verse and the temerity to take on the topical subjects still teeming in the South (and elsewhere).
She manages to be both “old school” and completely innovative, at the same time, and I was excited to see a contemporary poet bringing back some classic rhyming patterns that deserve to re-emerge.
This was my favorite:
Graveyard Blues
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
When the preacher called out I held up my hand;
When he called for a witness I raised my hand—
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
The sun came out when I turned to walk away,
Glared down on me as I turned and walked away—
My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road’s always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
I’m not sure that any writer has ever inspired me to feel like I understand the state better than I currently do, nor has one caused me to reflect on such devotion and confusion for loving such a complicated place.
Here, the Mississippi carved
its mud-dark path, a graveyard
for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
Here, the river changed its course,
turning away from the city,
as one turns, forgetting, from the past--
If you aren’t an American and/or you aren’t familiar with the state of Mississippi, it is a Southern state, and one that has struggled with deep socioeconomic burdens, low public school funding, and a long legacy of racism.
I don’t think that anyone’s going to argue with me when I declare that William Faulkner is the most famous writer ever to hail from that place, and I can tell you, with a decent amount of confidence, that he would have loved this Pulitzer winning collection of Natasha Trethewey’s.
I was not familiar with Ms. Trethewey’s poetry before NATIVE GUARD, nor was I familiar with her backstory: she was the daughter of a Black woman (a social worker) and a white man (a poet and professor) in Mississippi, in the 1960s, then the step-daughter to an abusive man who went on to murder her mother when she was 19.
Ms. Trethewey is a gifted poet who is blessed with both the technical prowess needed to tackle verse and the temerity to take on the topical subjects still teeming in the South (and elsewhere).
She manages to be both “old school” and completely innovative, at the same time, and I was excited to see a contemporary poet bringing back some classic rhyming patterns that deserve to re-emerge.
This was my favorite:
Graveyard Blues
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
When the preacher called out I held up my hand;
When he called for a witness I raised my hand—
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
The sun came out when I turned to walk away,
Glared down on me as I turned and walked away—
My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road’s always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
November 3, 2022
“What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives”--Trethewey, in Memorial Drive
“Everybody knows about Mississippi”--Nina Simone
“America was never innocent”--James Ellroy, in the opening sentence of American Tabloid
Natasha Trethewey realized she would become a poet when her mother was killed by her mother’s second husband, as she knew she had to make sense of it. Trethewey's father was the poet Eric Trethewey, who divorced from Natasha’s mother when Natasha was six.
In this book we learn: Natasha was forced to read in her required History book in school that blacks had it much better when they were slaves, when they were well fed and cared for by their masters. She notes that while there are numerous granite accolades for the dead Confederate soldiers, there are no such tributes for the Native Guard. But she's wrong, as this book is such a tribute, from a women "born a crime" as evidence of miscegenation, the child of a white man and black woman.
Native Guard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2006. The Native Guard refers to black regiments--freed slaves--who fought for the Union in the Civil War. In this collection Trethewey connects the murder of her mother and the Civil War and continuing racism. Her (black) social worker mother and (white) father’s marriage was illegal in Mississippi, as was the birth of their daughter Natasha (Dad named her as he was reading War and Peace). I also read Trethewey’s 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive, and afterwards read an LATW theatrical adaptation of Native Guard acted by an Atlanta Theater group, accompanied by music. Powerful to hear the poems read by a range of actors.
Theories of Time and Space
Natasha Trethewey
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end
at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches
in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand
dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only
what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock
where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:
the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return
Nina Simone sings Mississippi Goddamn, a song decrying racial injustice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ25-...
“Everybody knows about Mississippi”--Nina Simone
“America was never innocent”--James Ellroy, in the opening sentence of American Tabloid
Natasha Trethewey realized she would become a poet when her mother was killed by her mother’s second husband, as she knew she had to make sense of it. Trethewey's father was the poet Eric Trethewey, who divorced from Natasha’s mother when Natasha was six.
In this book we learn: Natasha was forced to read in her required History book in school that blacks had it much better when they were slaves, when they were well fed and cared for by their masters. She notes that while there are numerous granite accolades for the dead Confederate soldiers, there are no such tributes for the Native Guard. But she's wrong, as this book is such a tribute, from a women "born a crime" as evidence of miscegenation, the child of a white man and black woman.
Native Guard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2006. The Native Guard refers to black regiments--freed slaves--who fought for the Union in the Civil War. In this collection Trethewey connects the murder of her mother and the Civil War and continuing racism. Her (black) social worker mother and (white) father’s marriage was illegal in Mississippi, as was the birth of their daughter Natasha (Dad named her as he was reading War and Peace). I also read Trethewey’s 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive, and afterwards read an LATW theatrical adaptation of Native Guard acted by an Atlanta Theater group, accompanied by music. Powerful to hear the poems read by a range of actors.
Theories of Time and Space
Natasha Trethewey
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one—
by—one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end
at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches
in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand
dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past. Bring only
what you must carry—tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock
where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:
the photograph—who you were—
will be waiting when you return
Nina Simone sings Mississippi Goddamn, a song decrying racial injustice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ25-...
November 2, 2007
Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard is (I swear) one of the BEST collections of poetry I have read in a long time.
This collection is seemingly simple. The language is clear, stripped down, and imagistic. The narratives are straightforward and very easy to follow, especially for those who don't read much poetry "because it is hard to understand."
But for those who LOVE poetry and understand it, Native Guard is virtually flawless. Each poem is layered in so many different ways one could read the book straight-through in 45 minutes and be pleased with the read. But if one rereads it again and again, the layers start shedding--in terms of form, fixed form, line breaks, manuscript organization, response to New Criticisms, etc., etc., etc.
The formal poetry is so veiled by the gorgeous language that I almost didn't even realize it was written in form. How I've longed to be able to pull off that trick!
This book is a throw back to older contemporary poetry--in the good way. It has that pure, honest integrity of Sharon Olds, Jane Kenyon, and, dare I say, Robert Bly.
In other words, Native Guard is sincerely unpretentious. It's not full of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. It's a collection of poetry that is simple--in the complex sense of word, not at all complicated to be complicated.
I wholehearted recommend Native Guard to poetry readers and non-poetry readers. Its poems about loss, history, the South, race, religion, and humanity are accessible yet exceptionally well-crafted.
This book clearly deserved to win a Pulitzer Prize, and I'm excited to see what Trethewey will do in the future.
The gems in this collection: "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971," "Myth," "Scenes From A Documentary History of Mississippi," "Native Guards," and "Southern History."
This collection is seemingly simple. The language is clear, stripped down, and imagistic. The narratives are straightforward and very easy to follow, especially for those who don't read much poetry "because it is hard to understand."
But for those who LOVE poetry and understand it, Native Guard is virtually flawless. Each poem is layered in so many different ways one could read the book straight-through in 45 minutes and be pleased with the read. But if one rereads it again and again, the layers start shedding--in terms of form, fixed form, line breaks, manuscript organization, response to New Criticisms, etc., etc., etc.
The formal poetry is so veiled by the gorgeous language that I almost didn't even realize it was written in form. How I've longed to be able to pull off that trick!
This book is a throw back to older contemporary poetry--in the good way. It has that pure, honest integrity of Sharon Olds, Jane Kenyon, and, dare I say, Robert Bly.
In other words, Native Guard is sincerely unpretentious. It's not full of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. It's a collection of poetry that is simple--in the complex sense of word, not at all complicated to be complicated.
I wholehearted recommend Native Guard to poetry readers and non-poetry readers. Its poems about loss, history, the South, race, religion, and humanity are accessible yet exceptionally well-crafted.
This book clearly deserved to win a Pulitzer Prize, and I'm excited to see what Trethewey will do in the future.
The gems in this collection: "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971," "Myth," "Scenes From A Documentary History of Mississippi," "Native Guards," and "Southern History."
July 5, 2015
Natasha Trethewey was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. During those years she was a regular presence on public television, appearing on “Where Poetry Lives,” a series aired on PBS’s The News Hour. Those wonderful segments are still available online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/where.... Trethewey became the Poet Laureate of Mississippi in 2012 and still retains that post.
Native Guard is Trethewey’s third book of poetry; first published in 2006, it won the Pulitzer for poetry in 2007. The book’s about the history of the South, of race and racism, of war and peace. The eponymous Native Guard, founded in 1862, was the first African-American regiment in the Union Army. One job assigned to this unit was guarding the prison-of-war camp at Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island, Mississippi. The crown sonnet sequence of ten sonnets that makes up “Native Guard” tells the history of the guard from 1862-1865. Each poem is titled with a date, and begins with a revision of the line that ended the sonnet preceding it. The first poem in the sequence begins with the end of the last poem, thus it is a crown of connected sonnets. Her revisions of lines are intense, clever and beautiful. For example, here is the ending of the first sonnet (“November 1862”) and the beginning of the second (“December 1862”):
These connected sonnets tell their story in stunning language, portraying in detail the minds and lives of some of the members of the guard. The irony of their situation (former slaves now guarding the allies of their former masters) is not lost on them. Neither is their awareness of the power of the pen.
But the book is also about Trethewey’s mother, a black Southern woman who married Natasha’s father, a white man, a man who was (is) a poet and a professor of literature. (The book is dedicated to Trethewey’s mother, who died in 1985: “For my mother, in memory.”) Trethewey was born the year before Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal in every state of the United States, including Mississippi. So her very existence combined the strands of Southern history, her very presence a reminder of how those Southern states still, a hundred years after the Civil War was over, had not absorbed the fact that things had changed. Trethewey addresses this subject in “Miscegenation,” a powerful ghazal (a musical form of a series of five to fifteen couplets, each ending with the same sound. The couplets are independent clauses and can stand alone as far as meaning goes. The last couplet includes the poet’s “signature.”) Here is that poem:
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Chicago to marry, returned to Mississippi.
They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong--mis in Mississippi.
A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.
Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.
My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.
When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.
I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.
So much happening here. Say it aloud and hear the music. Note the connection of Christmas and Easter, of Faulkner and Tolstoy, and of Joe Christmas with Natasha Trethewey. Even the “sin” in Cincinnati lines up with the “mis” in Mississippi.
Trethewey’s book appeals not only to all readers who love smart and strong poetry but to all poets, who are always reading as poets, admiring line breaks and praising Trethewey’s most natural language even as it is constrained (perfectly) in classical poetic forms. How does she do it? How can I do it too? A form new to me is found in the poem, “Myth,” about Trethewey’s mother’s death. Read it and feel its emotional impact. Read it and see what you notice about the structure of its lines, its stanzas. How did she do it?
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
*
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.
But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—
I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.
The poems in this book are just so strong and speak a truth so deep and grounded, I am tempted to just copy them all here in this review. I settled for two favorites and some pieces of sonnets to make a point. If you love poetry, this book is key. Get it. Then read it, and read it again.
Native Guard is Trethewey’s third book of poetry; first published in 2006, it won the Pulitzer for poetry in 2007. The book’s about the history of the South, of race and racism, of war and peace. The eponymous Native Guard, founded in 1862, was the first African-American regiment in the Union Army. One job assigned to this unit was guarding the prison-of-war camp at Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island, Mississippi. The crown sonnet sequence of ten sonnets that makes up “Native Guard” tells the history of the guard from 1862-1865. Each poem is titled with a date, and begins with a revision of the line that ended the sonnet preceding it. The first poem in the sequence begins with the end of the last poem, thus it is a crown of connected sonnets. Her revisions of lines are intense, clever and beautiful. For example, here is the ending of the first sonnet (“November 1862”) and the beginning of the second (“December 1862”):
I now use ink
to keep record, a closed book, not the lure
of memory—flawed, changeful—that dulls the lash
for the master, sharpens it for the slave.
For the slave, having a master sharpens
the bend into work, the way the sergeant
moves us now to perfect battalion drill,
dress parade.
These connected sonnets tell their story in stunning language, portraying in detail the minds and lives of some of the members of the guard. The irony of their situation (former slaves now guarding the allies of their former masters) is not lost on them. Neither is their awareness of the power of the pen.
But the book is also about Trethewey’s mother, a black Southern woman who married Natasha’s father, a white man, a man who was (is) a poet and a professor of literature. (The book is dedicated to Trethewey’s mother, who died in 1985: “For my mother, in memory.”) Trethewey was born the year before Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision which made interracial marriage legal in every state of the United States, including Mississippi. So her very existence combined the strands of Southern history, her very presence a reminder of how those Southern states still, a hundred years after the Civil War was over, had not absorbed the fact that things had changed. Trethewey addresses this subject in “Miscegenation,” a powerful ghazal (a musical form of a series of five to fifteen couplets, each ending with the same sound. The couplets are independent clauses and can stand alone as far as meaning goes. The last couplet includes the poet’s “signature.”) Here is that poem:
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Chicago to marry, returned to Mississippi.
They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong--mis in Mississippi.
A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.
Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.
My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.
When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.
I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.
So much happening here. Say it aloud and hear the music. Note the connection of Christmas and Easter, of Faulkner and Tolstoy, and of Joe Christmas with Natasha Trethewey. Even the “sin” in Cincinnati lines up with the “mis” in Mississippi.
Trethewey’s book appeals not only to all readers who love smart and strong poetry but to all poets, who are always reading as poets, admiring line breaks and praising Trethewey’s most natural language even as it is constrained (perfectly) in classical poetic forms. How does she do it? How can I do it too? A form new to me is found in the poem, “Myth,” about Trethewey’s mother’s death. Read it and feel its emotional impact. Read it and see what you notice about the structure of its lines, its stanzas. How did she do it?
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
*
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.
But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—
I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.
The poems in this book are just so strong and speak a truth so deep and grounded, I am tempted to just copy them all here in this review. I settled for two favorites and some pieces of sonnets to make a point. If you love poetry, this book is key. Get it. Then read it, and read it again.
Read
April 4, 2025Native Guard is a combination of identity poems (Trethewey is the daughter of a black mother and white father and grew up in Mississippi -- a recipe for identity poetry if ever there was one!) and poems about black soldiers who served in the Civil War. She's a precise poet who pays attention to what passes for little things, like line breaks, and she's not afraid to mix form poems with free verse.
Here is a poem from the book's Civil War mode. The Native Guards were the first officially sanctioned black regiment to serve in the Union Army.
Elegy for the Native Guards
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . .
—Allen Tate
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee—
half reminder of the men who served there—
a weathered monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.
The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance—
each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.
And here is another inspired by Trethewey's own biography:
Genus Narcissus
Faire daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soone.
-Robert Herrick
The road I walked home from school
was dense with trees and shadow, creek-side,
and lit by yellow daffodils, early blossoms
bright against winter’s last gray days.
I must have known they grew wild, thought
No harm in taking them. So I did—
gathering up as many as I could hold,
then presenting them, in a jar, to my mother.
She put them on the sill, and I sat nearby
watching light bend through the glass,
day easing into evening, proud of myself
for giving my mother some small thing.
Childish vanity. I must have seen in them
some measure of myself –the slender stems,
each blossom a head lifted up
toward praise, or bowed to meet its reflection.
Walking home those years ago, I knew nothing
of Narcissus of the daffodils’ short spring-
how they’d dry like graveside flowers, rustling
when the wind blew—a whisper, treacherous,
from the sill. Be taken with yourself,
they said to me; Die early, to my mother.
Here is a poem from the book's Civil War mode. The Native Guards were the first officially sanctioned black regiment to serve in the Union Army.
Elegy for the Native Guards
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea . . .
—Allen Tate
We leave Gulfport at noon; gulls overhead
trailing the boat—streamers, noisy fanfare—
all the way to Ship Island. What we see
first is the fort, its roof of grass, a lee—
half reminder of the men who served there—
a weathered monument to some of the dead.
Inside we follow the ranger, hurried
though we are to get to the beach. He tells
of graves lost in the Gulf, the island split
in half when Hurricane Camille hit,
shows us casemates, cannons, the store that sells
souvenirs, tokens of history long buried.
The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance—
each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?
All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.
And here is another inspired by Trethewey's own biography:
Genus Narcissus
Faire daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soone.
-Robert Herrick
The road I walked home from school
was dense with trees and shadow, creek-side,
and lit by yellow daffodils, early blossoms
bright against winter’s last gray days.
I must have known they grew wild, thought
No harm in taking them. So I did—
gathering up as many as I could hold,
then presenting them, in a jar, to my mother.
She put them on the sill, and I sat nearby
watching light bend through the glass,
day easing into evening, proud of myself
for giving my mother some small thing.
Childish vanity. I must have seen in them
some measure of myself –the slender stems,
each blossom a head lifted up
toward praise, or bowed to meet its reflection.
Walking home those years ago, I knew nothing
of Narcissus of the daffodils’ short spring-
how they’d dry like graveside flowers, rustling
when the wind blew—a whisper, treacherous,
from the sill. Be taken with yourself,
they said to me; Die early, to my mother.
July 28, 2021
This was the second volume of poetry I read during a recent trip along the Oregon coast, following Jane Kenyon's Constance. Accessibility and musings on death provided a surprising bridge between the two collections, but where Kenyon remained focused on the personal, Trethewey's work is deeply connected to the social experience of racism in the South, from the Civil War to the present.
She employs a range of poetic forms to explore her own mixed-race childhood in Mississippi, her Black mother's early death at the hands of her abusive second husband, and the history of the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, invoking Nina Simone, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.
A member of the Native Guard draws on his former life as a slave to describe his new freedom in the title poem:
Haunting. Highly recommended.
She employs a range of poetic forms to explore her own mixed-race childhood in Mississippi, her Black mother's early death at the hands of her abusive second husband, and the history of the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, invoking Nina Simone, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.
A member of the Native Guard draws on his former life as a slave to describe his new freedom in the title poem:
For the slave, having a master sharpens
the bend into work, the way the sergeant
moves us now to perfect battalion drill,
dress parade. Still, we're called supply units-
not infantry-and so we dig trenches,
haul burdens for the army no less heavy
than before. I heard the colonel call it
nigger work. Half rations make our work
familiar still.
Haunting. Highly recommended.
July 9, 2015
4 and 1/2 stars
The first section of poems dealing with the author's mother (and her death) gets 5 stars. I loved the poems individually and as a whole. Whenever I read a poem, I read it at least twice. The second time is to let the words wash over me, as the first time the content is unfamiliar and I can only seem to focus at first on what the poem says and not how it sounds and flows. These poems were impressive during both readings.
Perhaps because I loved the first section so much, I was slightly less impressed with the latter two sections, but that is only in comparison, because the rest of the book is still wonderful. I especially appreciated learning about a history I didn't know of, that of the Civil War regiments of the Louisiana Native Guard, black soldiers who manned a Union prison of Confederate captives on Ship Island, Mississippi, a place I've driven by many times.
The first section of poems dealing with the author's mother (and her death) gets 5 stars. I loved the poems individually and as a whole. Whenever I read a poem, I read it at least twice. The second time is to let the words wash over me, as the first time the content is unfamiliar and I can only seem to focus at first on what the poem says and not how it sounds and flows. These poems were impressive during both readings.
Perhaps because I loved the first section so much, I was slightly less impressed with the latter two sections, but that is only in comparison, because the rest of the book is still wonderful. I especially appreciated learning about a history I didn't know of, that of the Civil War regiments of the Louisiana Native Guard, black soldiers who manned a Union prison of Confederate captives on Ship Island, Mississippi, a place I've driven by many times.
November 15, 2020
WHAT IS EVEIDENCE
Not the fleeting bruises she'd cover
with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint
of a scope she'd pressed her eye too close too,
looking for a way out, nor the quiver
in the voice she'd steady, leaning
into a pot of bones on the stove. Not
the teeth she wore in place of her own, or
the official document — its seal
and smeared signature — fading already,
the edges wearing. Not the tiny marker
with its dates, her name, abstract as history.
Only the landscape of her body — splintered
clavicle, pierced temporal — her thin bones
settling a bit each day, the way all things do.
January 29, 2014
I read this over two days and most of the poems several times over. The blurbs on the back point out her "elegiac verse that honors her mother and father". Another blurb states, "Trethewey serves our profound need for that rare thing - artistically fine Civil War poetry."
Sure, there's elegies and a few may include the Civil War as a backdrop, but these poems are so much more. They are some of the most deeply American poems I've read. But even more, they evoked a sense of what it means to be human, to be alive with struggle and to desire the penetration of the soul by empathy and understanding from others.
I lost my mother a couple of years ago after a long illness. It's caused me to steer clear of books on loss. I honestly didn't know this book was going to deal with Trethewey's loss of her own mother. I wasn't expecting nor wanting to identify with someone else's loss.
But, it happened. And the identifying didn't cause an emotional response, necessarily, but it did force me to remember that day, and the forcing, in the end, turned out to be just what I needed:
Myth
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
*
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.
But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—
I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.
That's how my loss was for me - I identify, I empathize, I know - and that's why there are no limits to what a poem can do.
If you are at all interested in modern American poetry, I couldn't recommend this more highly. There is a reason Trethewey has ascended to the height of Poet Laureate in the budding of her career. This short book of poems is not the trite blurbs on the back, these poems illustrate what it means to be an American, to suffer loss only to overcome in the end.
Sure, there's elegies and a few may include the Civil War as a backdrop, but these poems are so much more. They are some of the most deeply American poems I've read. But even more, they evoked a sense of what it means to be human, to be alive with struggle and to desire the penetration of the soul by empathy and understanding from others.
I lost my mother a couple of years ago after a long illness. It's caused me to steer clear of books on loss. I honestly didn't know this book was going to deal with Trethewey's loss of her own mother. I wasn't expecting nor wanting to identify with someone else's loss.
But, it happened. And the identifying didn't cause an emotional response, necessarily, but it did force me to remember that day, and the forcing, in the end, turned out to be just what I needed:
Myth
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,
the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking
you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.
*
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.
But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—
I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.
That's how my loss was for me - I identify, I empathize, I know - and that's why there are no limits to what a poem can do.
If you are at all interested in modern American poetry, I couldn't recommend this more highly. There is a reason Trethewey has ascended to the height of Poet Laureate in the budding of her career. This short book of poems is not the trite blurbs on the back, these poems illustrate what it means to be an American, to suffer loss only to overcome in the end.
July 25, 2012
This is a wonderful book of poems. The author writes of black regiments during the Civil War, her experiences as a mixed race child in Mississippi, her parents' marriage. It's a short but packed volume and I highly recommend it to poetry lovers and general readers who would like to try poetry.
March 28, 2020
" The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance—
each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy? - Third stanza of "Elegy for the Native Guards"
This is a very intensely focused volume of poetry about Natasha Trethewey, her mother, her parents, and her hometown and the state of Mississippi. The book is named after the first black solders to official serve in the American Civil War. These solders are, of course, not commemorated in any monument in her home state, so she memorialized them on this page. A big focus of this book is also the fact that she spent her early years in a mixed-race family (her father was white), when it was illegal and dangerous to do so. It was interesting to read this straight-forward biographical book after my previous read from Ezra Pound. In any case this was a short and concise use of biography, history, and confessional in verse-form. This was one of the poets that was brought to my attention by Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.
has placed a plaque here, at the fort’s entrance—
each Confederate soldier’s name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy? - Third stanza of "Elegy for the Native Guards"
This is a very intensely focused volume of poetry about Natasha Trethewey, her mother, her parents, and her hometown and the state of Mississippi. The book is named after the first black solders to official serve in the American Civil War. These solders are, of course, not commemorated in any monument in her home state, so she memorialized them on this page. A big focus of this book is also the fact that she spent her early years in a mixed-race family (her father was white), when it was illegal and dangerous to do so. It was interesting to read this straight-forward biographical book after my previous read from Ezra Pound. In any case this was a short and concise use of biography, history, and confessional in verse-form. This was one of the poets that was brought to my attention by Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.
August 5, 2019
In my dream,
the ghost of history lies down beside me,
rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.
I am aware of that heft. I feel by contemplation. I don't think it crushes me with any immediacy. I am a white guy in the middle of nowhere. My wife tells me nightly about being in an immigrant in the same location. The endless jokes about accents. The questions, the notes on Trump she's asked to endure. The sneers.
I was introduced to the author by my departing CEO. I won't forget that. The themes of this collection are blood and soil. Defensive history teachers who sigh when imagining the way it used to be. How Christmas babies link Tolstoy and Faulkner, how the circumstances of such was itself a crime. This is poetry at its greatest for me personally, allowing ideas to float, bathed in light and to consider, to contemplate our evolving relationships. Is it timely to read verse expounding on themes of blood and race? I sour legacy a provocation? Should it be avenged?
the ghost of history lies down beside me,
rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.
I am aware of that heft. I feel by contemplation. I don't think it crushes me with any immediacy. I am a white guy in the middle of nowhere. My wife tells me nightly about being in an immigrant in the same location. The endless jokes about accents. The questions, the notes on Trump she's asked to endure. The sneers.
I was introduced to the author by my departing CEO. I won't forget that. The themes of this collection are blood and soil. Defensive history teachers who sigh when imagining the way it used to be. How Christmas babies link Tolstoy and Faulkner, how the circumstances of such was itself a crime. This is poetry at its greatest for me personally, allowing ideas to float, bathed in light and to consider, to contemplate our evolving relationships. Is it timely to read verse expounding on themes of blood and race? I sour legacy a provocation? Should it be avenged?
December 5, 2022
With a matter-of-fact and more or less non-poetic language, Trethewey poeticizes the personal history of blacks through putting her mother or a mother figure at the center of the poetic gaze, and also the public history of blacks through a retelling of the Civil War from the point of view of the black soldiers or the eponymous Native Guards.
the relatively long poem "Native Guards", with poetic succinctness and anticlimactic description, narrates an untold little history of the Civil war; of how the black soldiers were betrayed and shot by their own allies, the white union soldiers!
I usually highlight lines from the poems I read to quote and get back to whenever I feel like a romantic! I did the same with this book, but I lost the file somehow. That's why I can't quote any lines here for you, which does not mean, however, that it didn't have any highlights.
the relatively long poem "Native Guards", with poetic succinctness and anticlimactic description, narrates an untold little history of the Civil war; of how the black soldiers were betrayed and shot by their own allies, the white union soldiers!
I usually highlight lines from the poems I read to quote and get back to whenever I feel like a romantic! I did the same with this book, but I lost the file somehow. That's why I can't quote any lines here for you, which does not mean, however, that it didn't have any highlights.
February 6, 2015
“You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.”--Theories of Time and Space
Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems has language crystal-cut—sharp, hard, clear, exquisite—with a bordering restraint. These stories are about memory, her own and those of her people. These poems are not just, not only, about race. Who are her people? They are us.
“in sleep, their bodies curved—parentheses…”--Southern Gothic
The longest poem in this slim book, Native Guard, spans the war years…the Civil War years. Men learn how to fight, how to die, how to live. They write letters home for their fellows, alive or dead, “unanswered.” It begins, and ends, with the phrase “Truth be told.” Is it memory that will save us? The title is underlined by a quote from Frederick Douglass “If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?” Memory may save us.
These poems reconstruct lived experience from memories.
January 4, 2013
I received this book as a Christmas present from our oldest. We both really like poetry, so she picked this one out for me. It's a poignant collection of poems that span over a hundred years of American history, filled with raw emotions and vivid imagery. I had never really heard of Natasha Trethewey before nor had I heard about her Pulitzer Prize-winning work.
Overall, it's a quick read and an interesting insight into one woman's history as well as the racial conflicts in America going as far back as the Civil War. I am very glad that I got this book as a present and I enjoyed listening to the CD read by the author as well. I'm not sure if this is a book I'll keep or donate. I'm not ready to share this one with our girls, so I might just hold on to it until they are older.
interesting quote:
"Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other
in sleep, their bodies curved -- parentheses
framing the separate lives they'll wake to. (p. 41 - from the poem Southern Gothic)
Overall, it's a quick read and an interesting insight into one woman's history as well as the racial conflicts in America going as far back as the Civil War. I am very glad that I got this book as a present and I enjoyed listening to the CD read by the author as well. I'm not sure if this is a book I'll keep or donate. I'm not ready to share this one with our girls, so I might just hold on to it until they are older.
interesting quote:
"Early evening, they have not yet turned from each other
in sleep, their bodies curved -- parentheses
framing the separate lives they'll wake to. (p. 41 - from the poem Southern Gothic)
October 21, 2024
I remember reading this around 2008 but can't remember how I would rate it.
August 1, 2021
Absolutely perfect, completely unforgiving.
July 1, 2019
A strong cycle of poems sparked by the death of Trethewey's mother and research into Civil War history. Woven through these topics are reflections on race in American history and Trethewey's experience of growing up biracial. I found the parts about her mother and personal biography to be a little stronger than the parts on the Civil War, which were well-researched but still felt a bit second-hand.
Trethewey's style is concise and impactful. She gracefully connects imagery and ideas. She uses a variety of structures and repetition to fit the content of the poem and build resonance. Sometimes, her structure choices walked the line between resonant and gimmicky. "Myth," for example, was probably over that line.
I thought the most powerful, impactful poems were "Theories of Time and Space," "Southern Crescent," and "Elegy for the Native Guards." Here are a few lines of "Theories of Time and Space"
Trethewey's style is concise and impactful. She gracefully connects imagery and ideas. She uses a variety of structures and repetition to fit the content of the poem and build resonance. Sometimes, her structure choices walked the line between resonant and gimmicky. "Myth," for example, was probably over that line.
I thought the most powerful, impactful poems were "Theories of Time and Space," "Southern Crescent," and "Elegy for the Native Guards." Here are a few lines of "Theories of Time and Space"
On the dock
where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:
the photograph -who you were-
will be waiting when you return.
March 5, 2025
I knew this was great back when I first read it in 2022, but on reread, I'm convinced it's a masterpiece.
Since I last read this, I reread Absalom Absalom, read Tretheway's memoir about the murder of her mother, and, as I was rereading this, I was also rereading Team of Rivals, the Lincoln biography. The latter had me thinking about the Civil War and the time period, so the poems hit all the harder.
Here, Tretheway memorializes the Louisiana Native Guards, an all black regiment in the Union army. And she wrestles with the murder of her mother, what growing up mixed race in the south did to her and with southern literature, notably Faulkner and the Fugitive poets.
It's structurally ambitious and rigorous, informed by history and the effects of the past in the present, and it punches hard emotionally.
Easily one of the best poetry collections of the century so far.
Highest of recommendations!
Since I last read this, I reread Absalom Absalom, read Tretheway's memoir about the murder of her mother, and, as I was rereading this, I was also rereading Team of Rivals, the Lincoln biography. The latter had me thinking about the Civil War and the time period, so the poems hit all the harder.
Here, Tretheway memorializes the Louisiana Native Guards, an all black regiment in the Union army. And she wrestles with the murder of her mother, what growing up mixed race in the south did to her and with southern literature, notably Faulkner and the Fugitive poets.
It's structurally ambitious and rigorous, informed by history and the effects of the past in the present, and it punches hard emotionally.
Easily one of the best poetry collections of the century so far.
Highest of recommendations!
June 5, 2019
Trethewey writes beautifully disciplined verse about her mixed-race upbringing in Mississippi, her mother’s death and the South’s legacy of racial injustice. She occasionally rhymes, but more often employs forms that involve repeated lines or words. The title sequence concerns a black Civil War regiment in Louisiana. Two favorites from this Pulitzer-winning collection by a former U.S. poet laureate were “Letter” and “Miscegenation”; stand-out passages include “In my dream, / the ghost of history lies down beside me, // rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm” (from “Pilgrimage”) and “I return / to Mississippi, state that made a crime // of me — mulatto, half-breed” (from “South”).
August 15, 2022
In part inspired by the death of her mum and all black regiment of the civil war (The Louisiana Native Guards) composed mainly of former slaves who unironically guarded white Confederate war prisoners. It’s divided into three parts with 1 focused on the personal and loss of her mum. I liked this poem best, others felt more abstract
“AFTER YOUR DEATH
First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars
you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,
I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:
a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.”
Parts 2 and three are much stronger pieces, the titular poem Native Guard and “Scenes from a documentary of Mississippi” are among notable standouts.
Short collection but worth the read
“AFTER YOUR DEATH
First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars
you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,
I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken from the inside:
a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.”
Parts 2 and three are much stronger pieces, the titular poem Native Guard and “Scenes from a documentary of Mississippi” are among notable standouts.
Short collection but worth the read
March 22, 2023
Well, I feel almost hesitant to give a Pulitzer Prize winner less than 5 stars. It’s just that some of the poems didn’t really resonate with me, but the ones that did REALLY did.
This was a powerful poetry collection. It discusses heavy topics such as grief, biracial identity, and racism. If you’re a poetry lover, add it to your list.
This was a powerful poetry collection. It discusses heavy topics such as grief, biracial identity, and racism. If you’re a poetry lover, add it to your list.
October 28, 2016
I’ve read Native Guard three times now. It is very brief, even with notes it doesn’t reach 50 pages. Despite its brevity it is so richly compelling a collection that while you may well read it one sitting it will still take many more readings to finish. The book is remarkably expansive, starting in its three parts with the personal and familial, then moving to the national and historical in its second part, before concluding with a set of poems where personal and historical are combined. The collection’s motto is taken from Charles Wright: “Memory is a cemetery / I’ve visited once or twice, white / ubiquitous and the set-aside // Everywhere under foot…”
Memory is indeed omnipresent, a tangle of undergrowth, a path through time mapped or to be mapped, ancestors tugging at us with their life meanings and obligations to take the torch further up the field. Native Guard’s first poem is a kind of overture, describing a tourist boat trip that begins: “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.” It ends: “where you board the boat for Ship Island, / someone will take your picture: // the photograph—who you were— / will be waiting when you return.” The literal trip will be described in the third section but the experience of going back in time and place and story is what all three parts are about and, if you pay attention, who you are at trip’s end will not be who you were at its start.
Trethewey’s mother was black, her father white. They were married at a time when such a marriage was illegal in their home state of Mississippi. So this is no ancient history and slavery, the Civil War, and segregation are very much at the heart of all these poems, as is what makes individuals unique and stronger than the presumptions others place upon them, threaten them with, or the obstacles put in their way.
The first section’s poems are about Trethewey’s mother, her passing, and their relationship which, like so many that matter to us, is imperfect and measured too much by what’s not: “I’m too late, / again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.” She recalls train rides taken at different times, years and circumstances apart. “Today, // she is sure we can leave home, bound only / for whatever awaits us, the sun now / setting behind us, the rails humming / like anticipation, the train pulling us / toward the end of another day. I watch / each small town pass before my window / until the light goes, and the reflection / of my mother’s face appears, clearer now / as evening comes on, dark and certain.”
The book’s title sequence about the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the war’s earliest black regiments, is brilliantly rendered and is the heart of the second part. One of the regiment’s duties was to guard Confederate prisoners held on Ship Island. The narrator of the poems is based on a figure whose journal, written in those resource deprived days upside down between the lines of another man’s journal, presents a complex portrait of freedom and the military service black troops provided. These included in the narrator’s case writing letters on behalf of illiterate Southern white prisoners and fighting while being shot at in an incidence of intentional friendly fire when shipboard Union soldiers preferred the retreating black troops to the oncoming Rebels as targets. “Some names shall deck the page of history / as it is written on stone. Some will not.” Those who will not include black troops abandoned by their commanding general on Port Hudson’s battlefield, refusing a burial truce on the grounds that he had “no dead there,” so the fallen troops receive no burial, no stone memorials.
Tretheway will revisit the moments captured here on her own visit to Port Hudson and Ship Island in the third section. She will include childhood memories of learning a contra-history to the war’s actual meaning and purpose. “Before the war, they were happy, he said, / quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year // history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, / and better off under a master’s care.” She notes that no one disagreed, not even her. There was more to cover and the class was getting ready to watch Gone with the Wind, “a true account of how things were back then,” her teacher says. In Elegy for the Native Guards she notes that the plaque at Ship Island’s prison fort, placed there by the Daughters of the Confederacy, mentions only the white prisoners, not the names of the Native Guards. Hurricane Camille, the poem continues, has destroyed the white cemetery there. “Only the fort remains, nearly forty feet high, / round, unfinished, half open to the sky, / the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.”
Native Guards received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. I have two more collections of Ms. Trethewey’s poetry but I don’t know that I’m quite done with Native Guards.
Memory is indeed omnipresent, a tangle of undergrowth, a path through time mapped or to be mapped, ancestors tugging at us with their life meanings and obligations to take the torch further up the field. Native Guard’s first poem is a kind of overture, describing a tourist boat trip that begins: “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.” It ends: “where you board the boat for Ship Island, / someone will take your picture: // the photograph—who you were— / will be waiting when you return.” The literal trip will be described in the third section but the experience of going back in time and place and story is what all three parts are about and, if you pay attention, who you are at trip’s end will not be who you were at its start.
Trethewey’s mother was black, her father white. They were married at a time when such a marriage was illegal in their home state of Mississippi. So this is no ancient history and slavery, the Civil War, and segregation are very much at the heart of all these poems, as is what makes individuals unique and stronger than the presumptions others place upon them, threaten them with, or the obstacles put in their way.
The first section’s poems are about Trethewey’s mother, her passing, and their relationship which, like so many that matter to us, is imperfect and measured too much by what’s not: “I’m too late, / again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.” She recalls train rides taken at different times, years and circumstances apart. “Today, // she is sure we can leave home, bound only / for whatever awaits us, the sun now / setting behind us, the rails humming / like anticipation, the train pulling us / toward the end of another day. I watch / each small town pass before my window / until the light goes, and the reflection / of my mother’s face appears, clearer now / as evening comes on, dark and certain.”
The book’s title sequence about the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the war’s earliest black regiments, is brilliantly rendered and is the heart of the second part. One of the regiment’s duties was to guard Confederate prisoners held on Ship Island. The narrator of the poems is based on a figure whose journal, written in those resource deprived days upside down between the lines of another man’s journal, presents a complex portrait of freedom and the military service black troops provided. These included in the narrator’s case writing letters on behalf of illiterate Southern white prisoners and fighting while being shot at in an incidence of intentional friendly fire when shipboard Union soldiers preferred the retreating black troops to the oncoming Rebels as targets. “Some names shall deck the page of history / as it is written on stone. Some will not.” Those who will not include black troops abandoned by their commanding general on Port Hudson’s battlefield, refusing a burial truce on the grounds that he had “no dead there,” so the fallen troops receive no burial, no stone memorials.
Tretheway will revisit the moments captured here on her own visit to Port Hudson and Ship Island in the third section. She will include childhood memories of learning a contra-history to the war’s actual meaning and purpose. “Before the war, they were happy, he said, / quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year // history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, / and better off under a master’s care.” She notes that no one disagreed, not even her. There was more to cover and the class was getting ready to watch Gone with the Wind, “a true account of how things were back then,” her teacher says. In Elegy for the Native Guards she notes that the plaque at Ship Island’s prison fort, placed there by the Daughters of the Confederacy, mentions only the white prisoners, not the names of the Native Guards. Hurricane Camille, the poem continues, has destroyed the white cemetery there. “Only the fort remains, nearly forty feet high, / round, unfinished, half open to the sky, / the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.”
Native Guards received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. I have two more collections of Ms. Trethewey’s poetry but I don’t know that I’m quite done with Native Guards.
October 9, 2024
I just love the ease and music with which these poems flow, how they make it look so simple to tell a story in a poem; how the collection forms a flawless unity from first epigraph to last word, how it comes full circle while pointing towards its sequel, thrall, which I'm now reading again. Both, Native Guard and thrall, prove to me once more why I enjoy learning through poetry so much.
April 4, 2018
สมควรแล้วที่ได้ Pulitzer เพราะนี่คือหนึ่งในกวีนิพนธ์ที่ลุ่มลึกที่สุดในวรรณกรรมอเมริกัน
Trethewey ร้อยเรียงบทกวีเกี่ยวกับประวัติศาสตร์สหรัฐฯ ช่วงสงครามกลางเมือง (ที่ถูกฝังไว้ ไม่มีใครยอมพูดถึง) และประสบการณ์ส่วนตัวผสานเป็นเอกภาพกวีนิพนธ์ ใช้ภาษาเรียบง่าย ว่าด้วยความรัก ความเกลียดชัง ความงาม ความอัปลักษณ์ แบบที่ไม่มีใครทำได้ลึกซึ้งเท่า
โคลงบทแรกเริ่มด้วย “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.” พออ่านจบแล้วมาสำรวจตัวเองอีกครั้งจะพบว่าเป็นแบบที่กวีพูดไว้จริง ๆ คนอ่านเป็นแบบไหนตอนเริ่มอ่าน พออ่านจบ รู้สึกได้เลยว่าเป็นคนละคนกันในแง่ความคิดอ่าน
ช่วงแรกกวีพูดถึงประสบการณ์ส่วนตัวที่ต้องสูญเสียแม่ไป งดงามทุกบทไม่ว่าจะอ่านแยกเป็นบทหรืออ่านทีเดียวรวด หลายบทล้วนกินใจ โดนเฉพาะบท Myth เขียนได้สะเทือนอารมณ์ ทั้งปวดร้าว ทั้งขมขื่น แต่ไม่มีความฟูมฟายเพ้อเจ้อ (กวีหลายคนพลาดตรงนี้) หลายบทเชื้อชวนให้นึกถึงคำถามปรัชญา "อะไรทำให้มนุษย์เป็นมนุษย์" คอยเตือนเราถึงการมีชีวิตเพื่อดิ้นรนต่อสู้และชวนชักให้เราเข้าอกเข้าเพื่อนมนุษย์ด้วยกัน
ช่วงที่สองเป็นโคลงเกี่ยวกับกองทหาร Louisiana Native Guards (เป็นนัยยะสำคัญของชื่อหนังสือ) ต่างจากกองทหารกองอื่นเพราะเป็นกองทหารที่เป็นผิวดำเป็นกองแรก ๆ ของทัพ มีหน้าที่คุมนักโทษฝั่ง Confederate กวีใช้คนเล่าเรื่องแบบเขียนบันทึกประจำวัน บอกเล่าประสบการณ์อันซับซ้อนของเสรีภาพที่ได้เจอในกองทหารผิวดำ นอกจากบันทึกประจำวันก็ยังมีรูปแบบจดหมายที่คนเล่าเขียนแทนนักโทษฝั่งสนับสนุนการมีทาสที่เขียนหนังสือไม่เป็น บรรทัดนี้น่าจะสะเทือนอารมณ์ที่สุด เพราะพูดถึง ทหารที่ตายแต่ไม่ได้รับการฝังศพ ไม่มีการรับรู้ใด ๆ ในแง่ความเป็นคนสำหรับทหารกลุ่มนี้
“Some names shall deck the page of history / as it is written on stone. Some will not.”
ช่วงที่สามว่าด้วยช่วงขณะที่ตัวกวีเองไปที่ Port Hudson กับ Ship Island บางบทพูดถึงประสบการณ์วัยเด็กที่ได้เรียนรู้สิ่งที่ขัดแย้งกับประวัติศาสตร์กระแสหลักในแง่ความหมายและจุดประสงค์ของสงคราม
“Before the war, they were happy, he said, / quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year // history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, / and better off under a master’s care.”
กวีบอกว่าแม้สิ่งที่ครูเล่าในห้องเรียนวิชาประวัติศาสตร์ที่พูดถึงการค้าทาสจะไม่เป็นจริง แต่ก็ไม่มีในห้องใครคัดค้าน แม้กระทั้งตัวกวีในวัยเด็กก็ไม่ได้ตอบโต้ เพราะครูอ้างว่ามีเนื้อหาวิชาอีกเยอะที่ครูต้องสอน แล้วครูก็เตรียมหนังเรื่อง Gone with the Wind (หนังเหยียดคนดำ) มาให้ดูประกอบการเรียน โดยครูบอกว่านี่คือ “a true account of how things were back then” มีอีกหลายบทที่กวีเขียนให้กระทุ้งสามัญสำนึกของสังคมที่อ้างว่า "คนเท่ากัน" ได้แสบทรวงพอ ๆ กับบทนี้
Frederick Douglass เคยกล่าวถึงสงครามกลางเมืองเอาไว้น่าสนใจว่า "If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?" คนขาวในสังคมมักจะรู้สึกกระอักกระอ่วนที่จะต้องพูดถึงหน้าประวัติศาสตร์อัปยศของตัวเอง บางคนก็ทำเป็นลืม ๆ มันไปซะ เหมือนไม่เคยเกิดขึ้น แต่ Trethewey ได้ออกมาตอกย้ำว่า สงครามและวิถีชีวิตแบบนี้ เราอย่าได้ลืมเด็ดขาด
เป็นเรื่องน่ายินดีที่สังคมอเมริกันยังมีกวีที่วิพากษ์วัฒนธรรมเหยียดคนดำได้ลึกล้ำขนาดนี้
Trethewey ร้อยเรียงบทกวีเกี่ยวกับประวัติศาสตร์สหรัฐฯ ช่วงสงครามกลางเมือง (ที่ถูกฝังไว้ ไม่มีใครยอมพูดถึง) และประสบการณ์ส่วนตัวผสานเป็นเอกภาพกวีนิพนธ์ ใช้ภาษาเรียบง่าย ว่าด้วยความรัก ความเกลียดชัง ความงาม ความอัปลักษณ์ แบบที่ไม่มีใครทำได้ลึกซึ้งเท่า
โคลงบทแรกเริ่มด้วย “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.” พออ่านจบแล้วมาสำรวจตัวเองอีกครั้งจะพบว่าเป็นแบบที่กวีพูดไว้จริง ๆ คนอ่านเป็นแบบไหนตอนเริ่มอ่าน พออ่านจบ รู้สึกได้เลยว่าเป็นคนละคนกันในแง่ความคิดอ่าน
ช่วงแรกกวีพูดถึงประสบการณ์ส่วนตัวที่ต้องสูญเสียแม่ไป งดงามทุกบทไม่ว่าจะอ่านแยกเป็นบทหรืออ่านทีเดียวรวด หลายบทล้วนกินใจ โดนเฉพาะบท Myth เขียนได้สะเทือนอารมณ์ ทั้งปวดร้าว ทั้งขมขื่น แต่ไม่มีความฟูมฟายเพ้อเจ้อ (กวีหลายคนพลาดตรงนี้) หลายบทเชื้อชวนให้นึกถึงคำถามปรัชญา "อะไรทำให้มนุษย์เป็นมนุษย์" คอยเตือนเราถึงการมีชีวิตเพื่อดิ้นรนต่อสู้และชวนชักให้เราเข้าอกเข้าเพื่อนมนุษย์ด้วยกัน
ช่วงที่สองเป็นโคลงเกี่ยวกับกองทหาร Louisiana Native Guards (เป็นนัยยะสำคัญของชื่อหนังสือ) ต่างจากกองทหารกองอื่นเพราะเป็นกองทหารที่เป็นผิวดำเป็นกองแรก ๆ ของทัพ มีหน้าที่คุมนักโทษฝั่ง Confederate กวีใช้คนเล่าเรื่องแบบเขียนบันทึกประจำวัน บอกเล่าประสบการณ์อันซับซ้อนของเสรีภาพที่ได้เจอในกองทหารผิวดำ นอกจากบันทึกประจำวันก็ยังมีรูปแบบจดหมายที่คนเล่าเขียนแทนนักโทษฝั่งสนับสนุนการมีทาสที่เขียนหนังสือไม่เป็น บรรทัดนี้น่าจะสะเทือนอารมณ์ที่สุด เพราะพูดถึง ทหารที่ตายแต่ไม่ได้รับการฝังศพ ไม่มีการรับรู้ใด ๆ ในแง่ความเป็นคนสำหรับทหารกลุ่มนี้
“Some names shall deck the page of history / as it is written on stone. Some will not.”
ช่วงที่สามว่าด้วยช่วงขณะที่ตัวกวีเองไปที่ Port Hudson กับ Ship Island บางบทพูดถึงประสบการณ์วัยเด็กที่ได้เรียนรู้สิ่งที่ขัดแย้งกับประวัติศาสตร์กระแสหลักในแง่ความหมายและจุดประสงค์ของสงคราม
“Before the war, they were happy, he said, / quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year // history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, / and better off under a master’s care.”
กวีบอกว่าแม้สิ่งที่ครูเล่าในห้องเรียนวิชาประวัติศาสตร์ที่พูดถึงการค้าทาสจะไม่เป็นจริง แต่ก็ไม่มีในห้องใครคัดค้าน แม้กระทั้งตัวกวีในวัยเด็กก็ไม่ได้ตอบโต้ เพราะครูอ้างว่ามีเนื้อหาวิชาอีกเยอะที่ครูต้องสอน แล้วครูก็เตรียมหนังเรื่อง Gone with the Wind (หนังเหยียดคนดำ) มาให้ดูประกอบการเรียน โดยครูบอกว่านี่คือ “a true account of how things were back then” มีอีกหลายบทที่กวีเขียนให้กระทุ้งสามัญสำนึกของสังคมที่อ้างว่า "คนเท่ากัน" ได้แสบทรวงพอ ๆ กับบทนี้
Frederick Douglass เคยกล่าวถึงสงครามกลางเมืองเอาไว้น่าสนใจว่า "If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?" คนขาวในสังคมมักจะรู้สึกกระอักกระอ่วนที่จะต้องพูดถึงหน้าประวัติศาสตร์อัปยศของตัวเอง บางคนก็ทำเป็นลืม ๆ มันไปซะ เหมือนไม่เคยเกิดขึ้น แต่ Trethewey ได้ออกมาตอกย้ำว่า สงครามและวิถีชีวิตแบบนี้ เราอย่าได้ลืมเด็ดขาด
เป็นเรื่องน่ายินดีที่สังคมอเมริกันยังมีกวีที่วิพากษ์วัฒนธรรมเหยียดคนดำได้ลึกล้ำขนาดนี้
May 13, 2015
Native Guard is by Pulitzer Prize winner and US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. Her father named her after Tolstoy's character Natasha in War and Peace she says in the poem Miscegenation which is included in the collection. Born in 1966, Trethewey's parents were a black woman and a white man, and their marriage was illegal in her native state of Mississippi. They had to flee to Ohio to be wed. She also tells about this in the poem Miscegenation.
The title Native Guard refers to the first black regiment of troops that were sanctioned by the Union Army during the US Civil War. These men were mostly ex- or runaway slaves. The longest poem in the collection also called Native Guard talks about these men, their battles, their guarding over white Confederate soldiers who were owners of slaves and often only half or totally illiterate. The narrator in the poem is an officer named Francis E. Dumas who is literate and the son of a white Creole father and a mulatto mother. The Native Guard though loyally fighting for the Union are often betrayed, sometimes left unburied after they are killed in battle. Their story is forgotten, neglected, and covered over in Mississippi by monuments and plaques of praise to the Confederate troops.
Other poems in the collection tell about Natasha's mother who later was divorced from her white husband, her abuse by her second husband who was black and her ultimately being murdered by him which Natasha doesn't really mention in these poems, but she does writes of visits to her mother's grave. However, there are poems about Natasha's parents' marriage, her childhood, how the three of them are outcasts in the Mississippi town where they reside, the lies she is taught in school about slavery making life idyllic for everyone including the slaves before the Civil War, the cross burned on their front lawn by the Klu Klux Khan. A whole lot more is packed into this collection of poems, some of which have appeared in various poetry and literary journals before being published in this collection.
I really enjoyed these poems. Trethewey's poetry has a quiet and sophisticated sadness and anger to it. How she controls her sadness, longing, and anger in such a quiet and elegant way is admirable. I like angry poets who write about controversial topics with explosive words, but I also have an intense admiration for those like Natasha Trethewey who expresses her alienation and anger so eloquently and measuredly subdued.
The title Native Guard refers to the first black regiment of troops that were sanctioned by the Union Army during the US Civil War. These men were mostly ex- or runaway slaves. The longest poem in the collection also called Native Guard talks about these men, their battles, their guarding over white Confederate soldiers who were owners of slaves and often only half or totally illiterate. The narrator in the poem is an officer named Francis E. Dumas who is literate and the son of a white Creole father and a mulatto mother. The Native Guard though loyally fighting for the Union are often betrayed, sometimes left unburied after they are killed in battle. Their story is forgotten, neglected, and covered over in Mississippi by monuments and plaques of praise to the Confederate troops.
Other poems in the collection tell about Natasha's mother who later was divorced from her white husband, her abuse by her second husband who was black and her ultimately being murdered by him which Natasha doesn't really mention in these poems, but she does writes of visits to her mother's grave. However, there are poems about Natasha's parents' marriage, her childhood, how the three of them are outcasts in the Mississippi town where they reside, the lies she is taught in school about slavery making life idyllic for everyone including the slaves before the Civil War, the cross burned on their front lawn by the Klu Klux Khan. A whole lot more is packed into this collection of poems, some of which have appeared in various poetry and literary journals before being published in this collection.
I really enjoyed these poems. Trethewey's poetry has a quiet and sophisticated sadness and anger to it. How she controls her sadness, longing, and anger in such a quiet and elegant way is admirable. I like angry poets who write about controversial topics with explosive words, but I also have an intense admiration for those like Natasha Trethewey who expresses her alienation and anger so eloquently and measuredly subdued.
October 15, 2010
Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey is filled with poems about American History and Natasha Tretheway's personal history. I asked myself this question. Is it possible to separate myself from history larger than life or is it a part of my smaller world? Ms. Tretheway gives a quote spoken by Frederick Douglass. "If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?" I think my question has been answered by an ancestor who is still alive in my soul every time I read The Narrative of Frederick Douglass.
Other poems in the book seem to be weaved of red silk ribbon. So that in this landscape of poetry I will not lose my way. These poems are braids of love and hate, beauty and ugliness. These words are woven as tightly as a rag rug of different textures and shape. I did not count the number of times Natasha Tretheway wrote about photographs. She remembers the Civil war by looking at a picture. "Some send photographs - a likeness in case/ the body can't return." Here is another piece of American History in a photograph. "From the arch, / from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down, and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground./ I wonder if Natasha Trethewey might have used a photograph as another name for memory. Our mental memories are never snatched from our hands by another person. These memories can not become torn up by a jealous man or woman. I have heard when death approaches our past, the photos in our mind, moments we lived each day become more distinct than any present time. I like knowing my past will come to revisit me again during those last hours on earth before death proves itself the winner of my spirit. "Death stops the body's work; the soul's a journeyman."
Natasha Tretheway writes about photographs along with reflections, dreams and dates. There are so many important dates in Native Guard. There is 1959. Then, she turns the clock further back in time to 1863. Forward again with the date 1966. Last but not least, she speaks about William Faulkner's Joe Christmas. Joe Christmas is the main character in Light in August by William Faulkner. I am complex because of my humanity. My memory is a crazy quilt of literature, wars, laws, nature and ancestors. My tiny moments are filled with all of this greatness. My joy runneth over thanks to Natasha Tretheway.
Other poems in the book seem to be weaved of red silk ribbon. So that in this landscape of poetry I will not lose my way. These poems are braids of love and hate, beauty and ugliness. These words are woven as tightly as a rag rug of different textures and shape. I did not count the number of times Natasha Tretheway wrote about photographs. She remembers the Civil war by looking at a picture. "Some send photographs - a likeness in case/ the body can't return." Here is another piece of American History in a photograph. "From the arch, / from every corner of the photograph, flags wave down, and great bales of cotton rise up from the ground./ I wonder if Natasha Trethewey might have used a photograph as another name for memory. Our mental memories are never snatched from our hands by another person. These memories can not become torn up by a jealous man or woman. I have heard when death approaches our past, the photos in our mind, moments we lived each day become more distinct than any present time. I like knowing my past will come to revisit me again during those last hours on earth before death proves itself the winner of my spirit. "Death stops the body's work; the soul's a journeyman."
Natasha Tretheway writes about photographs along with reflections, dreams and dates. There are so many important dates in Native Guard. There is 1959. Then, she turns the clock further back in time to 1863. Forward again with the date 1966. Last but not least, she speaks about William Faulkner's Joe Christmas. Joe Christmas is the main character in Light in August by William Faulkner. I am complex because of my humanity. My memory is a crazy quilt of literature, wars, laws, nature and ancestors. My tiny moments are filled with all of this greatness. My joy runneth over thanks to Natasha Tretheway.
January 15, 2015
Trethewey's tremendous strength is her merging of the lyric and the narrative such that work feels perfectly balanced and seamless.
Why the rough edge of beauty? she asks, in Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971.
...Why remember anything
but the wonder of those few days,
the iced trees, each in its leafy case?
The picture we took that first morning,
the front yard a beautiful, strange place--
why on the back has someone made a list
of our names, the date, the event: nothing
of what's inside--mother, stepfather's fist?
The rough edge, contained though it may be within a beautifully structured, taut poem, catches you out at the end. Trethewey is obsessed with history, particularly buried history. So, some of the poems are about her grief over her mother, who died at the hands of an abusive man, and others are about another kind of grief, the kind that accumulates when stories, such as those about a battalion of black Union soldiers, are forgotten.
For instance:
What is Evidence
Not the fleeting bruises she's cover
with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint
of a scope she'd pressed her eye too close to,
looking for a way out, nor the quiver
in the voice she'd sheady, leaning
into a pot of bones on the stove. Not
the teeth she wore in place of her own, or
the official document--its seal
and smeared signature--fading already,
the edges wearing. Not the tiny marker
with its dates, her name, abstract as history.
Only the landscape of her body--splintered
clavicle, pierced temporal--her thin bones
settling a bit each day, the way all things do.
From Native Guard:
1865
There are things which must be accounted for:
slaughter under the white flag of surrender--
black massacre at Fort Pillow; our new name,
the Corps d'Afrique--words that take the *native*
from our claim; mossbacks and freedmen--exiles
in their own homeland; the diseased, the maimed,
every lost limb and what remains: phantom
ache, memory haunting an empty sleeve;
the hog-eaten at Gettysburg, unmarked
in their graves; all the dead letters, unanswered;
untold stories of those that time will render
mute. Beneath battlefields, green again,
the dead molder--a scaffolding of bone
we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told.
Why the rough edge of beauty? she asks, in Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971.
...Why remember anything
but the wonder of those few days,
the iced trees, each in its leafy case?
The picture we took that first morning,
the front yard a beautiful, strange place--
why on the back has someone made a list
of our names, the date, the event: nothing
of what's inside--mother, stepfather's fist?
The rough edge, contained though it may be within a beautifully structured, taut poem, catches you out at the end. Trethewey is obsessed with history, particularly buried history. So, some of the poems are about her grief over her mother, who died at the hands of an abusive man, and others are about another kind of grief, the kind that accumulates when stories, such as those about a battalion of black Union soldiers, are forgotten.
For instance:
What is Evidence
Not the fleeting bruises she's cover
with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint
of a scope she'd pressed her eye too close to,
looking for a way out, nor the quiver
in the voice she'd sheady, leaning
into a pot of bones on the stove. Not
the teeth she wore in place of her own, or
the official document--its seal
and smeared signature--fading already,
the edges wearing. Not the tiny marker
with its dates, her name, abstract as history.
Only the landscape of her body--splintered
clavicle, pierced temporal--her thin bones
settling a bit each day, the way all things do.
From Native Guard:
1865
There are things which must be accounted for:
slaughter under the white flag of surrender--
black massacre at Fort Pillow; our new name,
the Corps d'Afrique--words that take the *native*
from our claim; mossbacks and freedmen--exiles
in their own homeland; the diseased, the maimed,
every lost limb and what remains: phantom
ache, memory haunting an empty sleeve;
the hog-eaten at Gettysburg, unmarked
in their graves; all the dead letters, unanswered;
untold stories of those that time will render
mute. Beneath battlefields, green again,
the dead molder--a scaffolding of bone
we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told.
October 15, 2009
Do you know what I hate? I mean besides mayonnaise? I hate jazz "best-of's." Some record exec. will cobble together 13 of Coltrane's "greatest" hits and sell it at Target. You pop it in your car and bop around like you're hip. The tracks move from Blue Train to Pursuance and leave you wondering why Coltrane got all weird. Well, you're not hip, you're a sucker. Sure, the tracks are good. But, listen to them along with the rest of their sibling tracks on the original album and suddenly, their GREAT. Jazz artists develop concepts and moods for albums; each one reveals something about that artist at the time and place it was written. The tracks work together to create an experience. Trethewey's poems are the same. Granted, most poetry collections try to achieve uniform themes, but she nails it. She really nails it. The poems are co-dependent, they build and explore common themes. Her poems are good, but the collection is great. She has really changed the way I think about the South and how I look at the only picture in my library, a reproduction of 'Veteran in a New Field' by Winslow Homer.
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