Native Guard: Poems

(Paperback)

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Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Tretheweys 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 Tretheweys 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 mothers 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.

Reviews

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 Tretheways] voice is a rare, beautiful gift to the reader." William Ferris, Joel R. WilliamsonEminent Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill "Natasha Trethewey serves our profound need for that rare thingartistically fine Civil War poetry...She is our Native Guard." David Madden, Louisiana State University, author of Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War

Author Bio

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.