Native Guard
Poems
HarperCollins · Print & ebook · April 3, 2007
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.
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- Who it’s for
- These elegies bring family memory into close conversation with the South’s racial history.
- Themes
- Southern racial history, A mother's memory and tribute, Overlooked Black Civil War soldiers
- Genres
- African American Poetry, War Poetry, American Poetry
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Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s 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.
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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 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. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.
Memory in Two Registers
These elegies bring family memory into close conversation with the South’s racial history.
Come here for
- Personal elegy beside the overlooked history of Black Union soldiers
- Poems rooted in the Deep South’s racial legacy
Expect
- A haunting exchange between private grief and national memory
- Loving tribute to Trethewey’s mother
Where it sits
| African American Poetry | 97% |
|---|---|
| War Poetry | 55% |
| American Poetry | 39% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- American Poetry
- African American Poetry
- Asian American Poetry
- Caribbean & Latin American Poetry
Show all 8 publisher categories
- Poetry About Death
- Place Poetry
- Family Poems
- Political & Protest Poetry
- Authors
- Natasha Trethewey
- Publisher
- HarperCollins
- Published
- April 3, 2007
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Southern racial history · A mother's memory and tribute · Overlooked Black Civil War soldiers
- Reading lane
- American Poetry