Native Guard: Poems [Hardcover]

Natasha Trethewey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Booklist

*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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 51 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company; 1st edition (2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618604634
• ISBN-13: 978-0618604630
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #971,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More 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.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Shock, Beauty, Sorrow, in a Lyric Sleeve May 22, 2007

By Jan E. Vanstavern

Format:Paperback

This is one of the best new poetry books I've read in years: from the haunting and surprising poems of elegy to the author's mother, in the opening section (including a hymn!) to the middle section's integration of Southern history with personal fact, to the striking end section's reflections on personal history, race, and the impact of being biracial in the South--this is an intricate, accessible, beautiful book. And, the range of forms and subtle but powerful techniques the author uses make this the most unified varied body of work since, maybe, the Beatles made the White Album.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars for teachers: cross curriculum gem April 22, 2007

By Pegeen

Format:Paperback

I recommend this book to middle and high school teachers of Lit and History -- a unique approach to history that will grab some kids otherwise just sitting, and a very accessible type of poetry for lit analysis and discussion. Select poems, and parts of poems as you see fit for your audience, but I found it a very good collection for a teacher -- and a a very thought-provoking read.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Poems you'll understand and enjoy April 5, 2009

By M. Perea

Format:Paperback

Forget the racial and ethnic tags--this is simply a fine book of poems.

Too many poets writing about themselves and their lives end up writing poems that mean something only to themselves. Natasha Trethewey isn't one of these poets. Though many of the poems in NATIVE GUARD grew out of the personal tragedy of her mother's murder, the poems aren't written in secret code, relying on private and indecipherable metaphor. Trethewey's poems are meaningful AND accessible--how many poems can you say that about?

The real trick to writing poetry today is to make what is personal (nearly every poet's subject) meaningful to readers who aren't you (and I don't mean critics). Trethewey does this through concrete imagery, precise diction, and sound--as in solid-- structure. You won't find the common abstractions that are supposed to leave you in awe--Tretheway's poems are easy to understand--on one level. When you return to them, though, they continue to reward you as you realize just how well crafted they are and how deep meaning runs.

She is a fine poet, and this collection is one of my favorites.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Every Single Moment Becomes A Part of Our Personal History October 15, 2010

By Grapes

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Turning away from the city, as one turns, forgetting, from the past-" December 6, 2007

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Weighted with temperament and the presence of graveyards, Trethewey paints vivid images of a past aware of its own history and the death of loved ones:

"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.

I wander now among names of the dead.
My mother's name, stone pillow for my head."
(Graveyard Blues)

Finding portents in simple childhood acts, the more mature poet replays such impulses in a new light:

"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."
(Genus Narcissus)

Bi-racial, the poet blends the spirit of her parents with the inevitability of their destinies and the legacy to their child:

"Already the words are changing. She is changing
from colored to negro, black still years ahead.
This is 1966- she is married to a white man-
And there are more names for what grows inside her."
(My Mother Dreams Another Country)

Recounting the discoveries of childhood with a history in the south- war and miscegenation- I am struck by the poet's embrace of time and place, the troubled years of war and the ubiquitous presence of race in daily life; yet she instinctively draws beauty where there is none, an intimate awareness of her parentage and position in a black and white world she treads so intuitively. There is much to be learned simply by listening to Trethewey's words, caught in the magic of her introspective nature. Luan Gaines/ 2007.