whathomemeans after we have left, as well as
what happens when our home leaves us or
refuses to acknowledge our claim to it.
The question of home is also central to the
book’s second section, which takes as its epigraph
a quote from Nina Simone: ‘‘Everybody knows
about Mississippi.’’ What the speaker in these
poems knows, however, is necessarily partial
and subjective. In the poem ‘‘Pilgrimage,’’ the
speaker spends the night in Vicksburg, a city,
like many in the South, that uses Civil War his-
tory as a tourist attraction. Trethewey writes, ‘‘In
my dream, / the ghost of history lies down beside
me, / / rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.’’
The subtlety of the speaker’s claims resonates
throughout this collection: it is the ghost of his-
tory, not history itself, that torments her, and it
does so in dreams, which speaks to the difficulty
of vanquishing such ghosts in waking hours. The
specificity with which Trethewey approaches the
question of Mississippi history, particularly with
regard to race, allows these poems to make claims
that might otherwise—and that arguably have
been—ignored for many years.
Also contained within this second section is
a crown of free-verse sonnets from which the
collection takes its title and which commemo-
rates the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the
first black regiments to fight for the Union dur-
ing the Civil War. Notes in the back of the book
offer more specific historical information about
the experiences of these soldiers, but what mat-
ters most in Trethewey’s poem is the muscular
eloquence of its first-person speaker, a man who
records what he sees and thinks in a used journal
stolen from a Confederate home, a man who
relies on ink rather than ‘‘the lure / of mem-
ory—flawed, changeful—that dulls the lash /
for the master, sharpens it for the slave.’’ In
another section of the poem, the speaker
recounts how he uses his skill at writing to
serve the Union and the other men in his
regiment.
...In lesser hands, this poem might have
allowed the historical information to become a
burden instead of an incentive, but Trethewey’s
poetic restraint allows us to experience the
speaker’s consciousness rather than merely to
imagine it. The poem’s final sentence, ‘‘Truth
be told’’ encapsulates the speaker’s earnest desire
to preserve his understanding of the war, but it
also speaks to what Trethewey accomplishes in
this poem—she tells a story that matters as only
the truth can. To speak of these things—or to
write of them, as do Trethewey and this
speaker—does not mitigate the harm of slavery
or the hardships suffered by black soldiers at the
hands of their white superiors, but it does give
voice to an overlooked portion of the historical
record.
Many of Trethewey’s poems insist that our
history is inescapable, even—perhaps especially
when—we most want to escape it. The third
section ofNative Guardexamines the paradoxi-
cal complexities of Mississippi’s racial history
and how it intertwines with the speaker’s per-
sonal experiences. In ‘‘My Mother Dreams
Another Country,’’ Trethewey writes.
...The major strength of these poems is the
compelling connections Trethewey makes
between personal experience and cultural mem-
ory. If these poems are confessional—and I
mean that without the implied pejorative often
attached to the term—their success lies not only
in their specificity but in the enormous control
evidenced in their lines. This control extends not
only to the poet’s use of language, her insistence
on using the right word even when it is an ugly
one, but also to the variety of forms that are used
in the book. Trethewey employs, among others,
the pantoum, the villanelle, the ghazal, the blues
lyric, and the traditional rhyming quatrain, and
she does so while maintaining a sense of preci-
sion in every line.
The book’s final poem, ‘‘South,’’ draws
together the book in a poem that is both an
elegy for Mississippi’s troubled racial history
and a personal declaration of defiance...
Source:Carrie Shipers, Review ofNative Guard,inPrai-
rie Schooner, Vol. 80, No. 4, Winter 2006, pp. 199–201.Sources
Ellis, Kelly Norman, Review ofNative Guard,inBlack
Issues Book Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, March–April
2006, p. 19.
Heidler, David S., and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds.,Encyclo-
pedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and
Military History, Norton, 2000.
Mlinko, Ange, ‘‘More Than Meets the I,’’ inPoetry, Vol.
191, No. 1, October 2007, pp. 56–72.
Seaman, Donna, Review ofNative Guard,inBooklist,
Vol. 102, No. 11, February 1, 2006, p. 22.Native Guard