About this item
Highlights
- 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.
- Pulitzer Prize (Poetry) 2007 1st Winner
- 64 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
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.Book Synopsis
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.
Review Quotes
The graceful form conceals a gritty subject.... Trethewey has a gift for squeezing the contradictions of the South into very tightly controlled lines." -- Washington Post Book World
"A moving testimony." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"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
"Remarkable." -- Robert Pinsky, Washington Post
"Trethewey is sure-handed in her use of language and fearless in confronting her own personal issues." -- The Advocate
"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
About the Author
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the current U.S. Poet Laureate and is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. Native Guard, her third collection of poetry, received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was published in 2010. A new collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming in September.