Native Guard - BookWyrm

No cover — Natasha Trethewey: Native Guard (Hardcover, 2007, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Hardcover, 51 pages

English language

Published Nov. 6, 2007 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

ISBN:: 978-0-547-05548-0
OCLC Number:: 1036740698

(2 reviews)

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 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 …

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 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.

5 editions

Adrián Astur Álvarez reviewed Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Review of 'Native Guard' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

My copy of this book is littered w margainalia from a student who was barely hanging on -

From the line "head south on Mississippi 49" MISSISSIPPI 49 circled darkly with the exclamatory note "Interstate!" nearby

- and this made me laugh multiple times while reading until I was reminded how ill equipped I am to engage with the work. Which are the important words when we're talking about Mississippi? Which experiences prevail? How am I any better than my spectral predecessor when I consider "what is to become of all the living things in this place?"

Trethewey writes with an emotional depth that is at times difficult to confront. She is a masterful poet and this collection engages in layer after layer.

sidra reviewed Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Review of 'Native Guard' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

good good

Subjects

American - General
Non-Classifiable
Poetry / Single Author / American
American Contemporary Poetry - Individual Poets
Poetry