Customer Reviews

Native Guard: Poems

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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.

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.

Civil War times, civil rights times, space age times are woven into a tapestry that trembles with grief, rage, and triumph. Civil War poetry worthy at last of the highest awards.

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.

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.

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.

Native Guard
by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard is a superb example of storytelling through poetry. Her seamless imagery flows like lyrical essays inviting you into her world of "southern living" as seen by a woman whose mother was black and father white; a product of the infamous unwritten law of the two races mixing in the 1950's.
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, there is no denying that Trethewey has a distinctive style and demands the attention of word artists. The title poem, Native Guard, is not only a poignant excerpt of Civil War history buried in the hidden archives of the south, Trethewey professes the contributions soldiers of African decent who served this country in the name of freedom for all men.
Native Guard opens with a story/poem of the disappointment of her mother at 16, who left "the dirt roads of Mississippi" on a train to California to meet her father only to find him nowhere in sight. Trethewey sweetly illustrates the torment of physical abuse by her stepfather, mourns the passing of her mother, the cross burning in her front yard, and the beauty of the South with all its degeneracy. Her stories flow in sonnets, a pantoum, and a verse form I have yet to identify illustrated in "Myth" (page 14) which left me awestruck. Her poetry exudes a gentle anger that is soothed with a balm of historical lessons.
Native Guard is familial history and southern history. Trethewey provides notes for the epigraphs she used as well as the sources used to create the title poem "Native Guard."
I highly recommend purchasing this book, if for no other reason, for the fact that the sister won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry! I only wish I counld have purchased the first edition!

Natasha Trethewey's poems reveal a poet with a strong voice, a sharp eye, and a masterful control of her words. She is a brilliant storyteller, who shares both the historical past and the very personal in her poems. This is an important, moving, haunting collection.

This is a thin book (not the gift edition) but it's very deep. It expresses what modern poetry needs & that is a sense of place & a new historical perspective. I picked this up because of the first poem in the book, Theories of Time & Space & I am not disappointed in the least. This book seems to carve "place" & put you there where the author is experiencing "living."

Admittedly, I'm not a poetry person. I bought this book because it was required reading for a lit class I took. However, I devoured this book and loved every single poem within it. Tretheway has a quiet but strong presence, and the words she writes jump right off of the pages. It is beautifully and wonderfully written, and I highly recommend it, even for non-poetry people.