Native Guard: Poems: A Pulitzer Prize Winner

By Natasha Trethewey

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 6, 2007
• ISBN: 9780547416328

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.

Book preview

Theories of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though

there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere

you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-

by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this

to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where

riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over

the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried

terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory,

its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,

someone will take your picture:

the photograph—who you were—

will be waiting when you return.

I

I’m going there to meet my mother

She said she’d meet me when I come

I’m only going over Jordan

I’m only going over home

—Traditional

The Southern Crescent

1

In 1959 my mother is boarding a train.

She is barely sixteen, her one large grip

bulging with homemade dresses, whispre

of crinoline and lace, her name stitched

inside each one. She is leaving behind

the dirt roads of Mississippi, the film

of red dust around her ankles, the thin

whistle of wind through the floorboards

of the shotgun house, the very idea of home.

Ahead of her, days of travel, one town

after the next, and California—a word

she can’t stop repeating. Over and over

she will practice meeting her father, imagine

how he must look, how different now

from the one photo she has of him. She will

look at it once more, pulling into the station

at Los Angeles, and then again and again

on the platform, no one like him in sight.

2

The year the old Crescent makes its last run,

my mother insists we ride it together.

We leave Gulfport late morning, heading east.

Years before, we rode together to meet

another man, my father, waiting for us

as our train derailed. I don’t recall how

she must have held me, how her face sank

as she realized, again, the

Reviews for Native Guard

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This work did not grip me as much as I believed it would. I would've thought for a work that won the Pulitzer that more would come forth, being impressed with their selections in the past. I feel that there was a disconnect for me in terms of its audience and that is why I could not appreciate it with the same gravity that others might. It was an interesting collection of poetry, but I felt it did not linger long after it was read.3 stars.

[danhammang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to know what to say about a great book of poetry. The verse is grounded in her experiences growing up in Mississippi and the memory of her mother. There is a deep sadness and longing in her poetry. She said she wrote it to come to terms with the deathj of her mother.

[jnwelch_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The title of Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard refers to the Lousiana Native Guards, a black regiment fighting for the Union in the Civil War. As explained in historical notes at the end, in one incident black Union soldiers and officers were fired on by white Union soldiers, and black dead on the battlefield were ignored by white Union soldiers because of their color.Much of the collection deals with remembering and forgetting. A Native Guard's journal in the title poem begins in November, 1862:"Truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life: the landscape'ssong of bondage - dirge in the river's throatwhere it churns into the Gulf, wind in treeschoked with vines."Along the way, he realizes to some extent tables have turned:"We know it is our duty now to keepwhite men as prisoners - rebel soldiers,would-be masters. We're all bondsmen here, eachto the other. Freedom has gotten them captivity."The narrator knows that for anyone in that war, freedom could become captivity, and the Native Guard remained on uncertain ground. It turns out his journal is an "official duty", and he is told "it's best to spare most detail, but I know there are things which must be accounted for." At the end of it all will be the dead on the field, and, though he does not want to forget, the dead will be forgotten.So much is forgotten in our lives, in our history. In the first section, she mourns the loss of her mother, and thinks about the loss of family history that attends that personal loss. In the horrifying "What is Evidence", the evidence is"Not the fleeting bruises she'd cover with make-up . . . nor the quiverin the voice she'd steady, leaninginto a pot of bones on the stove."In the rhythmic, formal poem "Myth", she deals with the irony of her dead mother reappearing in her dreams:"The Erebus [god of darkness] I keep you in - still trying -I make between my slumber and my waking.It's as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.I was asleep while you were dying."The second section deals predominantly with racism, with Nina Simone's "Everybody knows about Mississippi" as its epitaph. When a child reads the sign "Greenwood Library for Negroes", all she can say to slow-moving history is, "you are late". Yet that literacy is critical throughout this collection, with one soldier, for example, giving mixed-race officer Francis Dumas a tip of the hat for having "taught me to read and write," while at the same time making us think of mixed-race author Alexander Dumas, who lived such a different life.The third section has the poet reflecting on growing up as a mixed-race child. How her parents broke Missouri miscegenation laws, the shame she now feels because as a little girl she said nothing when taught in school that before the war slaves were "happy . . . The slaves were clothed, fed and better off under a master's care." She constantly questions her parents "why and why and why" , and comes home from school to ask them the meaning of "peckerwood and nigger lover, half-breed and zebra." Oh my.This Pulitzer Prize winner is bravely written, and often heart-breaking. It reminds us once more about how much should not be forgotten, and the devastating damage we can inflict on each other.

[quantumbutterfly_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A slim, powerful collection of poems. The core of the book deals with the Civil War and giving voice to the Black regiments who served and have received little honor.. She also talk about her mother's first marriage, growing up biracial, and some of the pain her mother faced.

[jimmychanga · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

These poems are heavy-handed and filled with cliches. Trethewey seems to be content in expressing a feeling at the end of the poem, as if the fact that she felt something was enough. Witness these bad lines (about death no less): "again, another space emptied by loss. / Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill." The poems in form are slightly better (I liked Myth and Graveyard Blues), perhaps the restraint helps her cut a sharper poem, but the free verse poems are bad: often prosaic, uninspiring, sloppy. Even her best poems are just mediocre; they lack any kind of original voice. How is this different from any other contemporary poet?

[plenilune · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every time I go back to this book, I am more awed by Trethewey's craft and talent. Each poem on each reading & re-reading is a small awakening.

[chellerystick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very good read that combines a clear and imaginative poetic voice with a heartwrenching history of Louisiana's Native Guard regiments.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection by Natasha Trethewey contains twenty-six poems divided into three sections. Each section's content is linked thematically as the poet examines her grief over her mother's death, the history of the eponymous 'Native Guard,' and growing up of mixed race in the South. The themes sound disparate, but are truly linked, often by the repetition of a thought or phrase, so that the collection as a whole flows together unmistakeably. Indeed, though I sometimes paused to linger on a single poem, I more often found myself wanting to go on before I lost the connecting thread.I do not read much poetry; after reading Native Guard, I have determined that I do not read enough poetry. Each poem reads simply - by which I do not mean that it is easy, but that I do not have to attack it with a sledgehammer to determine its meaning - contains strong emotion, and begs to be read aloud and savored. Though I find it hard in such a well-seamed collection to pick out one or two pieces as favorites, I often turned back to the first poem, 'Theories of Time and Space,' and had to stop reading to hold back tears when I came to 'Graveyard Blues.' This will definitely be one of my most memorable reads of the year.

[johnxlibris · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Natasha Trethewey's recent collection brings poetry back into the home. Or at least, it brought it back into mine. The elegant simplicity of her style often draped over complex forms is soft and inviting even when the subject matter is cold, stricken, and calloused.The presence of her mother invades every page. Indeed, for Trethewey, poetry becomes the monument for her mother: the physical marker on the landscape of history. It is a marker that history would just as soon forget, much like the Louisiana Native Guard, the first officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army and the focus of the second section. Trethewey's poetry creates a space for remembrance.But she does not travel into this space without hesitation. The opening poem, "Theories of Space and Time," illustrates her acknowledgment of what this trip might cost: "You can get there from here, though / there's no going home." The photograph someone snaps along the way and presents upon your return shows a different you. Nothing is quite the same again. But the will to remember, to create a history that remembers, (thankfully for us) overcomes the poet.One of my favorite poems, "What the Body Can Say," deals with the inability to reconcile sign and signified without a mediating context. In this case, the context is the body that figures forth "something" unnameable. As with the scarred back of the slave in "Native Guard," the body becomes the organ of speech, saying what the mouth or pen does not. This thought is wonderfully reinforced by the image of a notebook crosshatched in two different hands: one the hand of a white southerner, the other the hand of a black Native Guard soldier (this begs the questions: does Trethewey consider the work of the poet painful or traumatic?).The need for a human contextualizing agent comes up again and again throughout the first section: the poet offers herself as context in "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971"; "What is Evidence" again depicts the scarred body, contrasting it with the (less meaningful) historical document; "Letter" emphasizes the fragility of signs, especially ones outside the body (e.g. in the form of a letter to a friend); and "After Your Death" depicts the emotional magnitude of bodiless signs in the context of grief.Section 2 of Native Guard deals primarily with untold history. Stories that both the orthodox accounts and the landscape itself has forgotten. Section 3 is more personal and explores the role of the poet, our poet, in matters of race, the South, and the African-American's position among the two. Poems like "Incident" weave form with meaning with subtlety to overscore powerful images while poems like "Monument" go straight for the jugular: "At my mother's grave, ants streamed in / and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising / above her untended plot."I've read Native Guard twice I would eagerly suggest it to others.