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Native Guard

Natasha Trethewey

4.14 · Rating details · 3,423 ratings · 332 reviews

Through elegiac 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. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience ...more

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Paperback, 64 pages

Published April 3rd 2007 by Mariner Books (first published March 1st 2006)

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Jul 31, 2017 Brina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: african-american, poetry, pulitzer-winner, southern

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 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. ...more

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Mar 11, 2015 Margaret rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Sep 08, 2007 Amanda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry

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 ...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Teresa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Teresa by: Sue

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 sligh ...more

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Oct 22, 2010 Sue rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: poetry readers and lovers, those who'd like to try some poetry

Shelves: poetry, read-in-2010, plan-to-re-read, favorites

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.

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Mar 27, 2020 B. P. Rinehart rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history-stuff, poetry-stuff, un-decade-african-descent, biography, non-fiction-stuff, reading-in-a-time-of-corvid, modernism-and-post-modernism-stuff

" 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 officia ...more

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Jan 20, 2014 Douglas rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favorites, best-of-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 hum ...more

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Feb 06, 2015 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: family, history, poetry, nonfiction

“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 year ...more

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Aug 04, 2019 Jonfaith rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetshere

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 thi ...more

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Jan 03, 2013 Dolly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: fans of poetry

Shelves: military, nonfiction, other-usa, poetry-song-music, pulitzer, 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 b ...more

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Nov 25, 2019 sidra rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019

good good

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Jul 01, 2019 Phil Jensen rated it really liked it

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 v ...more

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May 31, 2019 Rebecca rated it really liked it

Shelves: bereavement-memoirs, free-other, poetry, history, pulitzer-prize

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 ...more

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Oct 28, 2016 Rick rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry

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 col 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. ...more

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Aug 01, 2017 Wuttipol rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

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 คนอ่านเป็นแบบไหนต 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 ...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Sincerae rated it it was amazing

Shelves: african-american-poetry

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 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. ...more

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Jan 09, 2015 Claudia Putnam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry

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' ...more

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Nov 03, 2016 Aj Sterkel rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

Natasha Trethewey is a former United States Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She’s biracial and grew up in America’s Deep South. In Native Guard, she writes about her childhood and the racial history of the South.

This collection is probably a good starting point for people who are new to poetry. Most of the poems are narrative. The language is beautiful but not unnecessarily complex. The collection is divided into three sections. My favorite section is the first one, where the aut ...more

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Oct 15, 2009 J. rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2009-reads, poetry

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 GREA ...more

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Jan 14, 2012 Bonny rated it it was amazing

I had to come back and read this again, something about it gets under your skin and remains. She is fearless. She weaves her own personal story among stories of the nation's past, tackling issues of love, death, abuse, interracial marriage, racial identity, racism, civil war and Reconstruction to name a few. Each poem is a strong voice in a larger conversation, and all packaged together make a powerful impression.

What is Evidence

Not the fleeting bruises she'd cover
with makeup, a dark patch as ...more

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May 17, 2013 Nan rated it liked it

This book is easy to read, approachable. Parts, though, are forgettable. It does feel as if Trethewey barely scratches the intensity of the subject. Race affects us all. Somehow some of these poems feel merely personal, like they affect the author only. Formal poetry can escape me. The ghazals got on my nerves and seemed heavy handed. I did like "After Your Death" very much. I wish there had been more of the Native Guard and poems like "Pilgrimmage". Those are pieces which I will remember and to ...more

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Aug 08, 2019 Francisca rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

i feel like i need to go hug my mum right now.

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Jan 22, 2019 Beverly rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, newtome2019

thoughts coming shortly

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Apr 28, 2018 KWinks rated it really liked it

Shelves: readingwomen18

I understand that many of these poems are about grief, identity, and a fort of black soldiers in the Civil War, but how the collection made me FEEL was that I was sitting at the table with Natasha Trethewey, maybe having coffee, and she was sharing photographs with me- giving me personal glimpses into her life. And I was grateful she shared.

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Feb 14, 2018 Dana Sweeney rated it really liked it

This collection comes in three parts. The first and last parts — meditations on Trethewey’s Family past and present — worked extremely well for me as a reader. Though the volume is slim, it is filled with heavy hitting poems meditating on race and biraciality and the omnipresence of history in the Deep South. The first and last sections were so good that they literally stopped me in my tracks and forced me to reread them again and again. Treasures like “Genus Narcissus,” “What the Body Can Say,” ...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Mona rated it it was ok

Shelves: 21st-century-lit, poetry, united-states

I came across this book while perusing the Favorite Poets of Color list. After learning that Natasha Trethewey is the current U.S. Poet Laureate, I requested it from the library.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on Trethewey's grief after the death of her mother, the second dips into the racial history of Mississippi, her home state, and the third section melds the previous sections together with its focus on her childhood and coming of age as the daughter of a I came across this book while perusing the Favorite Poets of Color list. After learning that Natasha Trethewey is the current U.S. Poet Laureate, I requested it from the library.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on Trethewey's grief after the death of her mother, the second dips into the racial history of Mississippi, her home state, and the third section melds the previous sections together with its focus on her childhood and coming of age as the daughter of a white father and black mother. On the whole, it's evident that Trethewey is exploring weighty subjects through her poetry, but each poem emphasizes minute descriptive detail and imagery.

My favorite poem in the collection was the title poem, written in the voice of a former slave who guards white Confederate prisoners during the Civil War in a fort in Gulfport, Mississippi. The depiction of war and death is unsettling, and she has some good lines with respect to race relations in the fort,

"We're all bondsmen here, each
to the other. Freedom has gotten them
captivity. For us, a conscription
we have chosen - jailors to those who still
would have us slaves."

However, the other poems in the collection didn't speak to me. Her turns of phrase just seemed so ordinary and not really poetic, if that makes sense. I'm not sure if that says something about me or Trethewey. I'm inclined to think it's just me. I don't know how to objectively judge a poem, apart from meter and imagery and form and metaphor and symbolism and all the other relevant devices. Is there something else left after the devices have been scrutinized and analyzed? For instance, when I read a book, even if it's not my favorite thing, I can usually still recognize its literary merits. But here? I don't get it. I read somewhere once that you know that something is a poem because it makes you feel something. But that's subjective and is it majority rules then? When I read most of the poems in this book, with the exception of "Native Guard", I didn't feel anything.

I don't know. Maybe I'll figure it out by the end of 2013, as I have four books of poetry left toward my goal. For now, this book just wasn't my thing. ...more

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Jun 15, 2012 Christina rated it really liked it

The most beautifully structured slim volume of poetry I've read, since I started paying attention to such things. The foot of each poem mortised to the head of the next, Trethewey's manuscript creates a frieze of images and ideas in perfectly logical progression. Beautifully crafted, intelligent, measured. The title sequence of sonnets, "Native Guard," a tour de force in itself.

Unfortunately, I've grown to loathe death poetry, and this manuscript is heavily weighted with them, in fact the entir ...more

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Sep 07, 2011 Serena rated it really liked it

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, is sliced into three sections with the first section paying homage to a mother who has passed from this world into the next. In “The Southern Crescent,” travel plays a particularly prominent role, with the train “humming like anticipation” as the narrator and her mother travel east and she sees her mother in the window clearly. Trethewey’s poems are concise and filled with imagery that anyone can connect with on a visceral lev ...more

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Dec 09, 2011 Ramón rated it it was amazing

This collection is haunting, filled with the paradoxical beauty and brutality of the South as experienced both historically and personally. In addition to the content, I love that many of her poems have more formal structure than the free verse that I'm used to reading, my favorite being the call and response of "Graveyard Blues". This not incredibly complex poetry, the vocabulary and form simple and precise. Nonetheless, it is extraordinarily lyrical, a pitch-perfect gospel chorus that quietly ...more

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Shelves: poetry

Poetry. Poems, beautiful and clear, interesting forms. Set in Mississippi from the perspective of a woman with a black mother and a white father. The title poem refers to the first regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army. Also recommended by this poet: Bellocq's Ophelia and Domestic Work.

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Recommends it for: anyone

Shelves: poetry

I don't think I will ever be able to read a poem written by Trethewey without being touched and or inspired.

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About Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey

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Natasha 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 Writi Natasha 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 will de[li]ver her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.

(from Wikipedia) ...more

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Quotes from Native Guard

“I returned
to a field of cotton, hallowed ground —

as slave legend goes — each boll
holding the ghosts of generations:

those who measured their days
by the heft of sacks and lengths

of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants
still sewn into our clothes.” — 3 likes

“In my dream,
the ghost of history lies down beside me,

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.” — 1 likes

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