Native Guard - Hardcover

Trethewey, Natasha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618604634 ISBN 13: 9780618604630

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006

Synopsis

Growing up in the Deep South, Natasha Trethewey was never told that in her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards -- one of the Union's first official black units. Trethewey's new book of poems pays homage to the soldiers who served and whose voices have echoed through her own life.

The title poem imagines the life of a former slave stationed at the fort, who is charged with writing letters home for the illiterate or invalid POWs and his fellow soldiers. Just as he becomes the guard of Ship Island's memory, so Trethewey recalls her own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man. Her parents' marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through elegiac poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South. Native Guard is haunted by the intersection of national and personal experience.

About this title

About the Author

Natasha Trethewey is the author of two previously published collections, Belloq’s Ophelia and Domestic Work. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, she was the recipient of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Grolier Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches creative writing at Emory University.

Reviews

The frontispiece of Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard informs me she was born in Gulfport, Miss., that her mother was black and her father white. Reasonable deduction (assuming the "I" of the poems is the poet) tells me that, in her formative years, issues pertaining to her biracial heritage were exacerbated by Mississippi's legacy of oppression -- its dark, buried history. In a region struggling to confront its past, how was a young poet supposed to learn to accept who she was?

Trethewey's personal dilemma must have been awkward, full of tangled emotions and memorable embarrassments. It's the kind of background that has humbled many people into silence. And yet, for the purposes of literature, aren't these kinds of growing pains priceless? We should probably envy this poet's peculiar destiny. Not only has Trethewey chosen speech rather than silence, she has chosen to express herself in verse. Given her material, she could easily write essays or a memoir. But she has a genuine gift for verse forms, and the depth of her engagement in language marks her as a true poet.

In Native Guard, Trethewey traces the buried history of the South to the point where her personal narrative begins. "In 1965, my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;/ they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi," begins a ghazal (a poem in two-line stanzas linked by a rhyme scheme) titled "Miscegenation." "My Mother Dreams of Another Country" jumps ahead to Trethewey's birth year and depicts her mother's distress: "This is 1966 -- she is married to a white man -- / and there are more names for what grows inside her./ It is enough to worry about words like mongrel/ and the infertility of mules and mulattoes."

The title poem is a 10-sonnet sequence in which the last line of each sonnet becomes a variant of the subsequent sonnet's opening line, creating a lovely, wreathlike effect. The graceful form conceals a gritty subject. "Native Guard" is a first-person narrative of an unnamed ex-slave who has joined the Union army to serve in an all-black regiment. The lines have a stately, chiming perfection. The circular form mirrors the bizarre circularity of circumstance that finds the narrator -- once a slave -- now guarding Confederates who have been captured and imprisoned inside the Union fort at Ship Island, Miss. The narrator compares his life in bondage to his life as a military officer, guarding the fallen rebels:

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.

Trethewey doesn't try to reproduce the way this character would actually speak. Whereas many poets would have spiced his monologue with dialect, she doesn't. Though a former slave, he is literate; he writes letters for his fellow soldiers. "I listen, put down in ink what I know/ they labor to say between silences." Trethewey gives her narrator a literary voice -- the voice of a 19th-century writer practiced in the diction and oratory of his time, of Frederick Douglass's masterful autobiographies, a voice that echoes the rhythms of great Western poetry.

Trethewey has a gift for squeezing the contradictions of the South into very tightly controlled lines. A certain staid, formal approach is both her strength and the only possible grounds I have to criticize her poetry. Native Guard is a small book, containing mostly short poems, a few of which read like exercises. When poets find their voices, form and content intermesh seamlessly. One can still see Trethewey's technique and feel the influence of poetry workshops. One feels a bit let down when a poem sets up an interesting emotional crisis, then resolves it almost too quickly. One feels at times as though her poems are succinct for the sake of making them work, rather than fulfilling either the poet's memory of her experience or the reader's heightened expectations.

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.

Reviewed by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Trethewey's exacting and resonant poetry is rooted in the shadow side of American history. In her first two collections, she empathically dramatizes the lives of women of color. Here she enters the arena of war and unveils a harrowing betrayal. In commanding, bayonet-sharp lyrics, Trethewey matches states of mind with states of nature and rigorously distills fact and feeling into loaded phrases and philosophical metaphors as she tells the terrible story of the Native Guard. Newly freed from slavery, the men were mustered in 1862 in Louisiana to become the first Union army regiment of black soldiers. But the courageous black troops who fell in combat were left unburied, and the black soldiers who continued fighting with valor and conviction were fired upon by their white comrades. Moving from grim historical events to personal history, Trethewey tells the story of a white man and a black woman who marry, even though their union is illegal in their home state of Mississippi. There a daughter is born, a poet in the making, profoundly attuned to the tragedies of racial strife. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618604634
• ISBN 13: 9780618604630
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 51