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Native guard

Natasha D. Trethewey, 1966-

Book - 2007

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Subjects
African American soldiers > Poetry.
Racially mixed people > Poetry.
Interracial marriage > Poetry.
Pulitzer Prizes.
Mothers > Poetry.
United States > History > Civil War, 1861-1865 > Participation, African American > Poetry.
Mississippi > Poetry.
Published
Boston : Houghton Mifflin 2007, c2006.
Edition
1st Mariner Books ed
Language
English
Physical Description
51 p. ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 47-49).
ISBN
0618872655
9780618872657
Main Author
Natasha D. Trethewey, 1966- (-)
  • Theories of time and space
  • I: The southern crescent
  • Genus narcissus
  • Graveyard blues
  • What the body can say
  • Photograph: ice storm 1971
  • What is evidence
  • Letter
  • After your death
  • Myth
  • At dusk
  • II: Pilgrimage
  • Scenes from a documentary history of Mississippi
  • King Cotton, 1907
  • Glyph, Aberdeen 1913
  • Flood
  • You are late
  • Native guard
  • Again, the fields
  • III: Pastoral
  • Miscegenation
  • My mother dreams another country
  • Southern history
  • Blond
  • Southern Gothic
  • Incident
  • Providence
  • Monument
  • Elegy for the native guards
  • South.
Review by Publisher Summary 1

A compilation of poetry addresses the complex history of the American South, offering a lyrical tribute to the Native Guard, one of the first black regiments in service during the Civil War and paying tribute to the author's mother and her illegal interracial marriage.

Review by Publisher Summary 2

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s elegiac Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.
The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a 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.

Review by Publisher Summary 3

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.

Review by Publisher Summary 4

Growing up in the Deep South, Natasha Trethewey was never told that in her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards -- one of the Union's first official black units. Trethewey's new book of poems pays homage to the soldiers who served and whose voices have echoed through her own life.

The title poem imagines the life of a former slave stationed at the fort, who is charged with writing letters home for the illiterate or invalid POWs and his fellow soldiers. Just as he becomes the guard of Ship Island's memory, so Trethewey recalls her own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man. Her parents' marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through elegiac poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South. Native Guard is haunted by the intersection of national and personal experience.

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