Will I love Native Guard?

By the time I reached Native Guard’s central crown of sonnets, Trethewey already had me with her blues poem and palindrome.

I love the formal-mindedness of this collection—also its authority and fearlessness. I admire the way Trethewey unites personal history (the speaker’s memories of childhood; her experience as a woman of color; her mother’s tragic death) and collective history (the unremembered Native Guard; systemic racism; the legacies of slavery and the Civil War).

Her poems help us ask the big questions together: what memories are held or erased by a community of people? How might collective grief inform private grief… show more.

This book, justly honored with the Pulitzer Prize, surprised me with its formal range and intensity of experience.

Trethewey is celebrated as a chronicler of our collective history, but I was far more taken with the poems of personal history—and, more specifically, personal loss. The poems that examine the absence left by her mother’s untimely death are, to me, the defining poems of the book. These often exemplify her gift for presenting the most telling detail or selecting the word that will resonate on the broadest level.

Let me hone in on one poem, “Myth,” a recasting of the Orpheus… show more.

Tretheway’s poetry, particularly her sonnets, are stunning and evocative and the main reason that this volume won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007. Some of the most powerful poems are spoken in the voice of a recently emancipated Black soldier who writes letters home for illiterate white prisoners of war. Whose stories are really being told by these poems? “They are cautious, dreading / the sight of us. Some neither read nor write, / are laid too low and have a few words to send / but those I give them” she writes, in “February 1863.” Such a brilliant,… show more.