The story is heroic; the architecture is con-
tained. Between the dialectical structure and the
variety of carefully crafted patterns she brings to
the matter—blues, ghazal, villanelle, sonnet, and
even an ingenious palindrome—Trethewey
brings together race and ratio, or the racial and
the rational, as if to heal the old irrational wound
inflicted by the state. However, the insistence on
symmetry and pattern becomes too pat, such as
when she sets the book up to begin and end with
passages to Gulfport. ‘‘Theories of Time and
Space,’’ her opener, seems written solely to
launch the plot:
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:
head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off
another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end
Sprezzaturathis is not. Like Lowell inLife
StudiesorFor the Union Dead,Trethewey does
some heavy lifting, and taking poetic flight is not
an option when you are ruled so fatefully by
reality, by facts. Although it is almost unaccept-
able to say so (say it!) monuments are by defini-
tion static and therefore risk being staid.
Memorial art is of a piece with death, at least if
you think, like me, that even representations
should be allowed their portion of autonomy. If
the poem is simply a vehicle, a means to an end,
there’s no need to ensure that every line conveys
vitality, but only that it communicates its point.
Then again, as a first-generation American
who’s done my share of bouncing around, what
do I know about passionate attachment to a
native land? When Trethewey dreams that she
is being photographed (in whiteface) with the
Fugitive poets and they turn on her with the
question, ‘‘You don’t hate the South?’’ (‘‘Pas-
toral’’), I am moved by the drama’s authentic
strangeness. Elsewhere, I admire the force of a
transverse association: in ‘‘Miscegenation’’ she
tells us that her name, Natasha, means ‘‘Christ-
mas child’’ in Russian. A few pages later, the
cross that is burned on her lawn one night is
‘‘trussed like a Christmas tree’’ and the whole
phantasmagoric scene has the effect of a night-
mare version ofThe Nutcracker.There’s a lot of
portentous symbolism inNative Guard,but that
unforeseen jete ́ redeems poems weighed down
with message.
I blame Lowell’s legacy for the traps that
snare Trethewey in a sometimes suffocating eli-
sion of closed form, close relations, and closeted
history. Trethewey does not match the knowing
egocentrism of lines like ‘‘I myself am hell’’ or ‘‘I
am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.’’
Implicit in her project, though, is Lowell’s
pinched notion that poetry begins with a psycho-
logical ‘‘I,’’ piquing prurient curiosity, then ele-
vates that ‘‘I’’ beyond memoir by placing it in a
larger context of recovering cultural memory.
It’s a formula by now, and it wasn’t a good
idea even when it was new: it reinforces the
prejudice against ‘‘mere’’ poetry (lyric, that triv-
ial thing) by requiring that poetry keep memory
alive or raise consciousness. If poetry does want
to achieve those things, it also has to give us new
ways of experiencing pleasure, which, after all, is
what makes lyric impossible to ignore.
Source:Ange Mlinko, Review ofNative Guard,inPoetry,
Vol. 191, No. 1, October 2007, pp. 59–61.Carrie Shipers
In the following excerpt, Shipers discusses the
power of the past in her review of Trethewey’s
Native Guard.
‘‘Why the rough edge of beauty?’’ asks the
poem ‘‘Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971,’’ in the first
section ofNative Guard,Natasha Trethewey’s
third collection. The answer offered throughout
the book is grief, an emotion explored in permu-
tations ranging from the intensely personal to the
historical. The first section of the book takes
bereavement, specifically the speaker’s loss of
her mother, as its subject. In ‘‘What the Body
Can Say,’’ the speaker considers several familiar
gestures—the posture of grief or prayer as well as
‘‘the raised thumb / that is both a symbol of
agreement and the request / for a ride,’’ the raised
fingers of the peace sign—and concludes:
What matters is context—
the side of the road, or that my mother
wanted
something I still can’t name: what, kneeling,
my face behind my hands, I might ask of
God.
Intertwined with grief for the loss of the
mother is grief for loss of an integral part of the
self, of one’s history, and of the opportunity to
better understand who and what we have lost.
As in ‘‘Theories of Time and Space,’’ the poem
that acts as the book’s preface, the meditations
on grief in the first third ofNative GuardaskNative Guard