Poetry for Students, Volume 29

lightness and cleanliness of the first part, tends to stress the actual. The already mentioned ‘‘punctual rape,’’ the ‘‘hunks an ...

Reibetanz, J. M., ‘‘The Reflexive Art in Richard Wilbur,’’ in University of Toronto Quarterly, Spring 1998, pp. 592–612. Reibeta ...

Native Guard The title of Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize- winning collectionNative Guard(2006) references a regiment of Afri ...

later remarried. Trethewey’s stepfather mur- dered her mother several years later, in 1985. Trethewey was nineteen at the time. ...

with someone else’s words, overlapped now, crosshatched beneath mine. On every page, his story intersecting with my own. January ...

1865 These are things which must be accounted for: slaughter under the white flag of surrender— black massacre at Fort Pillow; o ...

that everyone is born with as well as the similar patterns that everyone shares in dealing with the world and one’s own destiny. ...

mention of another battle, this one at Port Hud- son, which is located in Louisiana not far from Baton Rouge, along the Mississi ...

being held captive in the first place. They may have been promised freedom, but that freedom came with the price of prejudice. T ...

is free in his mind, as his master was an educated black man who taught him to read and write and to study nature. Yet, his body ...

for each of the following verses. Sometimes the repeated lines are twisted slightly, using similar words but changing the images ...

Major General Benjamin F. Butler was given permission to set up a volunteer army based on Ship Island. His plan was to set up a ...

edge of the water on West Ship Island (formerly the western side of Ship Island). Construction of the fort began in 1859. Two ye ...

258,000 Confederate soldiers, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Gen- eral Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1 ...

that is most prevalent and significant in Trethe- wey’s poem. An example of situational irony might be when a straight-A student ...

was interpreted through symbolism, scars that could arouse sympathy or disgust. That history was imposed by some other voice, on ...

ago denied the possibility that black people were human, now have to trust that this black soldier will write to their loved one ...

and then the ones that become the elegies for your mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. When did you realize the confluence of the tw ...

was because the writing of the poems led me to it. It was stunning for me, too, and painfully so. McHaney: You dedicateNative Gu ...

attention away from those national and regional stories and toward your private stories as we’ve just been talking about. I’d li ...