Native Guard
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Natasha Trethewey |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Poems |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
| Honors | |
| 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 and national history. | |
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 childhoodher 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.”
