Native Guard

by Natasha Trethewey

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618872657
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/03/2007
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	398,829
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.19(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.

Table of Contents

Theories of Time and Space     1
I
The Southern Crescent     5
Genus Narcissus     7
Graveyard Blues     8
What the Body Can Say     9
Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971     10
What is Evidence     11
Letter     12
After Your Death     13
Myth     14
At Dusk     15
II
Pilgrimage     19
Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi     21
King Cotton, 1907
Glyph, Aberdeen 1913
Flood
You Are Late
Native Guard     25
Again, the Fields     31
III
Pastoral     35
Miscegenation     36
My Mother Dreams Another Country     37
Southern History     38
Blond     39
Southern Gothic     40
Incident     41
Providence     42
Monument     43
Elegy for the Native Guards     44
South     45
Notes     47
Acknowledgments     51

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Trethewey serves our profound need for that rare thing—artistically fine Civil War poetry...She is our Native Guard."—David Madden, author of Sharpshooter

"The graceful form conceals a gritty subject...Trethewey has a gift for squeezing the contradictions of the South into very tightly controlled lines."—Book World The Washington Post

"[Native Guard] consistently presents Trethewey's belief that history is layered, full of bones and ghosts, and that the poet's job is to penetrate and expose." St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Trethewey is sure-handed in her use of language and fearless in confronting her own personal issues." The Advocate

"A moving testimony." Atlanta Journal Constitution

"Elegiac...eloquently told...profoundly moving...Trethewey is clearly a poet to savor."—Maxine Kumin

"In a very few years Natasha Trethewey has created a small body of nearly flawless poetry."—Rodney Jones

"[Natasha Tretheway’s] voice is a rare, beautiful gift to the reader."—William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill

Editorial Reviews

"Elegiac...eloquently told...profoundly moving...Trethewey is clearly a poet to savor." —Maxine Kumin

"In a very few years Natasha Trethewey has created a small body of nearly flawless poetry." —Rodney Jones

"[Natasha Tretheway’s] voice is a rare, beautiful gift to the reader." —William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill

"Natasha Trethewey serves our profound need for that rare thing—artistically fine Civil War poetry...She is our Native Guard." —David Madden, Louisiana State University, author of Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War —

From the Publisher

Trethewey's style is reserved, even cautious, though her subjects are emotionally charged, even violent. This creates an interesting dichotomy, especially in poems such as "Pastoral" with its touchy image of Trethewey confronting the great white Southern poets -- Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and others -- while in blackface. Though this is her third book, Trethewey is still perfecting her voice and may have only scratched the surface of her remarkable talent.
— The washington Post

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Trethewey (Domestic Work) draws on the life of her deceased mother and on the history of Mississippi, where the poet and her mother's family grew up, to limn a multiracial South and her own multiracial heritage. One poem tries to preserve her mother's memory ("certain the sounds I make/ are enough to call someone home"); the title poem's set of linked sonnets, where the last line of each one becomes the first line of the next, presents black Union soldiers who "keep/ white men as prisoners-rebel soldiers,/ would-be masters." A pantoun remembers the night Trethewey's family discovered a burning cross on her lawn; the concluding poem condenses the poet's mixed-and compelling-feelings about "Mississippi, state that made a crime// of me-mulatto, half-breed, native-/ in my native land, this place they'll bury me." (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Inaugural winner of the Cave Caen Poetry Prize, Trethewey uses her third collection to explore Southern history, focusing her steadfast prose on African Americans mustered into the Union Army. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The Alliance Theatre of Atlanta has created a dramatic version of Trethewey's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, and it is a marvelous presentation of the poetry. January LaVoy is The Poet, reading the works that Trethewey wrote for and about her mother, and Thomas Neal Antwon Ghant is The Native Guard, representing the men who traded service in the Union army for freedom from slavery. Both narrators have a deep understanding of the poems they read and the dramatic skill to convey them. The music that punctuates the performance is well chosen and well performed, adding still more to the emotional experience. Trethewey, who was twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, is a fine reader of her own work, but this presentation has found a way to go an interpretive step further. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

The Alliance Theatre of Atlanta has created a dramatic version of Trethewey's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, and it is a marvelous presentation of the poetry. January LaVoy is The Poet, reading the works that Trethewey wrote for and about her mother, and Thomas Neal Antwon Ghant is The Native Guard, representing the men who traded service in the Union army for freedom from slavery. Both narrators have a deep understanding of the poems they read and the dramatic skill to convey them. The music that punctuates the performance is well chosen and well performed, adding still more to the emotional experience. Trethewey, who was twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, is a fine reader of her own work, but this presentation has found a way to go an interpretive step further. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile