Thrall: Poems

By Natasha Trethewey

The stunning follow-up volume to Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard, by the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical—exploring her own interracial and complicated roots—and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history.

Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780547840420

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

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I

Elegy

Part II

Miracle of the Black Leg

On Captivity

Taxonomy

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata

Knowledge

Part III

The Americans

Mano Prieta

De Español y Negra; Mulata

Mythology

Geography

Torna Atrás

Bird in the House

Artifact

Fouled

Rotation

Part IV

Thrall

Calling

Enlightenment

How the Past Comes Back

On Happiness

Vespertina Cognitio

Illumination

Notes

Acknowledgments

Read More from Natasha Trethewey

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First Mariner Books edition 2015

Copyright © 2012 by Natasha Trethewey

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Trethewey, Natasha D., date.

Thrall : poems / Natasha Trethewey.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-57160-7 ISBN 978-0-544-58620-8 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3570.R433T47 2012

811'.54—dc23

2012017321

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover art: Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo (detail), c. 1750, oil on canvas by Juan Rodriguez Juárez (1675–1728)

Breamore House, Hampshire, UK/Bridgeman Images

eISBN 978-0-547-84042-0

v4.1118

To my father

What is love?

One name for it is knowledge.

—Robert Penn Warren

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

—T. S. Eliot

Elegy

For my father

I think by now the river must be thick

    with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

as it was that morning: drizzle needling

    the surface, mist at the banks like a net

settling around us—everything damp

    and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

    into the current and found our places—

you upstream a few yards and out

    far deeper. You must remember how

the river seeped in over your boots

    and you grew heavier with that defeat.

All day I kept turning to watch you, how

    first you mimed our guide’s casting

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

    between us; and

Reviews for Thrall

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The only other book of poetry I've read by Natasha Trethewey was Native Guard, which I loved. Thrall was good but didn't hold up to that same standard for me. These poems all address the complicatedness of mixed race, whether by exploring classic paintings and art or Trethewey's own (or perhaps her narrator's, I know that's often different in poetry though these felt very personal) relationship with her white father. The ones on art were particularly challenging because the artwork was not included. The final poem, "The Illumination," was my favorite.