Native Guard:
Natasha Trethewey
Houghton Mifflin, March 2006
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2007
Natasha Trethewey's muscular, luminous poems explore the complex memory of the American South -- history that belongs to all Americans. The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the Native Guard, one of the first black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In Trethewey's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. Native Guard is both a pilgrimage and an elegy, as Trethewey skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices.
Interwoven are poems honoring Trethewey's mother and recalling her fraught childhood -- her parents' interracial marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. Native Guard is a haunting, beguiling narrative, caught in the intersections of public and personal testament. As Rita Dove proclaimed, "Here is a young poet in full possession of her craft."
"Natasha Trethewey's remarkable new book Native Guard...achieves authority, moral, and poetic."
-Washington Post
"A moving testimony."
-Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"[Native Guard] 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
"Trethewey is sure-handed in her use of language and fearless in confronting her own personal issues."
-The Advocate
"Trethewey's exacting and resonant poetry is rooted in the shadow side of American history. In her first two collections, she emphathically dramatizes the lives of women of color. Here she enters the arena of war and unveils a harrowing betrayal. In commanding, bayonet-sharp lyrics, Tretheway 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, Tretheway tells the story of a white man and 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."
-Booklist, Starred Review
"In a very few years Natasha Trethewey has created a small body of nearly flawless poetry. The patient scope of her craft might recommend an art of miniatures, of late post-symbolist flourishes, but Trethewey has instead addressed significant issues of ethnicity and sexuality in such a way that she has marked a new stage in our national poetry. She has forged a singular art from a mixed racial experience without sacrificing either heritage."
-Rodney Jones
"Trethewey's elegiac poems honoring her mother, with which the book opens, show exquisite restraint. Her quiet control of formal patterns enhances the text. Part II, eloquently told, brings the reader face to face with some long-suppressed facts of African American history. The final section of profoundly moving autobiographical poems exhibits her remarkable skill-- a pantoum about the Ku Klux Klan, a ghazal about miscegenation, and a tightly rhymed 24-line elegy for the black troops on Ship Island. Trethewey is clearly a poet to savor."
-Maxine Kumin
"Juxtaposing her own history as a black woman growing up in the deep South to the lives of ex-slaves who served valiantly in the Union's first black regiment, Natasha Trethewey serves our profound need for that rare thing -- artistically fine Civil War poetry that expresses ways the war and Reconstruction affect all Americans to this very day. She is our Native Guard."
-David Madden, Louisiana State University, author of Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War and other works on the Civil War
"Natasha Trethewey's poems probe the American South and how family, race, and the past haunt its daily life. Like the daffodils she describes as "bright against winter's last gray days," her voice is a rare, beautiful gift to the reader."
-William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill
