Books like Native Guard

Our ghosts speak to us—especially the ghosts of our dead parents.

I’m captivated by Gordon’s double biography of this mother-daughter pair (in fact, I gobbled it up in a few sittings). Gordon’s telling of Wollstonecraft’s influence on Shelley’s life and thinking—beginning with the story of young Mary learning to read by tracing the words on her mother’s gravestone—is necessary for all of us who are interested in family legacy.

The book is so smart in revealing the lives of these two radical writers, and so soothing in its understanding of gripping storytelling, that I also listened to it as an audiobook on a cross-country road trip to see my own mother early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Without this book, I may never have made it through Nevada. 

This book taught me what “nonfiction” is.

Bechdel uses her narrator as a vehicle for thinking (in this case, for thinking through a narrator’s complex relationship with her mother), using a constellation of sources from Donald Winnicott to Virginia Woolf to The Sound of Music. She perfects the illusion/truth central to this genre: that we’re witnessing the writer’s process of discovery in real time.

When I’m inside the book, I feel as though I’m inside Bechdel’s brain. I know this feeling is a testament to her craft, but I still couldn’t help thinking, when I finished the book, that Bechdel was my friend. I wanted to call her up to continue our conversation about our parents—even though we’ve never met. 

Everyone should read this book and own this book, which contains key poems from A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen (the book for which Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950), The Bean Eaters, as well as new poems. Brooks’s sonnets are like a knife in a heart made vulnerable. I could read these poems—especially “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”—again and again. Gwendolyn Brooks was the best American poet of the twentieth century, bar none.

Kevin Young’s anthology is the latest in a long line of Black poetry anthologies; the first was James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), which Young duly acknowledges. Most of Young’s choices I agree with; some I don’t (at least one of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s great sonnets should have been included); but in the main it is a terrific anthology of poets historical up to the present day. I counted almost 40 sonnets among the poems included. Readers who are interested in the dates the poems were published can turn to an extensive set of notes in the back, which are really helpful.

Nadia Nurhussein’s book is critically important for understanding the role of dialect poetry in the African American poetic tradition. It is all too easy to dismiss the popularity of dialect poetry in America—including Black dialect—as an embarrassing phase in American taste and particularly problematic for poetry used in minstrelsy but Nurhussein argues for the importance of the craft of dialect poetry and the remarkable brilliance of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work along with many other poets working in many other dialects.

Marilyn Nelson’s poetry is staggeringly good, particularly the way she writes formal poems—sonnets!—in a humble voice, like her sonnet “From an Alabama Farmer.” Nelson’s poem “To the Confederate Dead,” with its epigraph by Allen Tate is a better poem than Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” with which it is in conversation. Nelson’s ‘wreath’ of sonnets, “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” is simply sublime.

I may never have written nonfiction had I not read and taught these astonishing essays. (I first read this book nearly twenty years ago, and I still teach Beard’s essays.)

Beard makes me believe in the complete personhood of her young narrators (sometimes young enough to be sleeping in cribs), and their ability to be the vehicle through which she can remember and make visible a family’s truths, secrets, and hilarities.

Beard’s work gave me license to turn my own younger self into a character who, with her intuitive understanding of her own family, could do battle for me on the page.

In line after line, Gilbert proves that poetry—more than any other medium—has the power to fully encapsulate the human condition and express emotions that very often seem beyond the power of speech.

I read this book as a lament and elegy. The title poem charts her mother’s descent into dementia and death, all recounted with a journalist’s sense of detail and an artist’s sense of compassion. I love the way her deft handling of form—in this case, a sonnet sequence—drags the reader into the slow decline.

The fourteen poems create sort of a meta (or mega) sonnet, with the last line of one poem repeated or echoed in the first line of the next. Every page has a line or phrase that stops me cold—I just have to reread it and let it fully sink in. Gilbert is well known for her books of feminist criticism, but in my view,… show more.

I love the music in these poems! I love the wry wit and unexpected turn of phrase—which may well be Salter’s hallmark. The title is, of course, a vivid example of her playful phrasing.

Salter is a deft formalist, and I am impressed by her effortless handling of some very demanding forms: villanelles, quatrains, sonnets, blank verse, haiku, and ghazals, not to mention various invented rhyme schemes. She is also a master of the slant rhyme, which, for a poet, is akin to the blue note in jazz.

As a parent, I am particularly moved by the poems about her daughters, which are tragically poignant and all too familiar. Salter is a devotee of James Merrill—one of my central poetic influences—and I think she has carried on his tradition more than any other poet I can name.

There was a time in our lives when we all loved poetry; this book will remind you why.

Stallings is the standard-bearer for new formalist poetry, which often looks to classical Greek myths for inspiration. I love the way she recasts familiar myths in a way that elucidates our modern condition. As with her other books, I was impressed—awed—by her ability to breathe new life into traditional forms and devise entirely new forms.

A prime example is “Three Poems for Psyche,” which veer(s) toward a contemplation of motherhood while recasting themes of domestic strife and time’s impassivity. I was floored by the first poem—essentially a palindrome, with each line of the first stanza repeated in the second—in reverse.

I love when poetry does things that prose simply cannot do, and you can rely on Stallings to do exactly that. The end words in “Alice in the Looking Glass,” for example,… show more.