Poems give voice to the forgotten

By Natasha Trethewey

Houghton Mifflin. 51 pp. $13.95

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Reviewed by John Freeman

In her latest volume,

Native Guard

, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey finds a wormhole to the past through the Negro spiritual. Its sounds can be heard in nearly every poem in this taut, mournful book, elevating grief into song, turning the blues into something as sacred and fleshly as mud:

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

The woman being buried is, one presumes, the poet's mother, but Native Guard doesn't have the whiff of the personal the way so much contemporary poetry does. Indeed, it hardly grieves in the conventional sense. Instead, it feels more like the ephemera that crowded the fiction of the late German novelist W.G. Sebald.

Everyone Trethewey describes is dead or gone; the memories of childhood she dredges up have an almost sepia-tint quality. Even when she takes a riverboat journey to historical sites, she finds kitsch and plaques from Daughters of the Revolution, nothing real. On the Web one can find videos of Trethewey as she performs these rites of passage with a baffled expression on her face.

What she is looking for, one presumes, is not found - hardly even glimpsed. The most powerful absence in the book is Trethewey's mother, who appears first as a corpse. In caring for its disposal, Trethewey begins to sound like the field workers her mother descended from. "A swarm of insects hollowing it," Trethewey writes in "After Your Death." "I'm too late, /again, another space emptied by loss. /Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill."

Rather than send the poet on a quest for identity, Trethewey's mother's body becomes a vessel for history in Native Guard. All of her curiosity about her ancestors' past is placed inside, filling up her death with a historical significance that goes beyond her own life span. In the book's powerful title poem, Trethewey imagines the life of a slave, the soldier, the field worker - their losses unconsecrated by anything as dignified as a funeral.

. . . unmarked

in their graves; all the dead letters, unanswered;

untold stories of those that time will render

mute. Beneath battlefields, green again,

the dead molder - a scaffolding of bone

we tread upon, forgetting.

Native Guard is Trethewey's attempt to give the unconsoled a voice, meaning, a place in time - even if it sometimes feels a bit like well-intentioned ventriloquism. Some poems imagine what soldiers would have written in their journals or to their mothers. Trethewey also detours back into her parents' history before diving back into the past, sifting her history and American history together, like an archaeologist.

At times, reading down the page, it's hard not to feel like Trethewey writes something approaching prose. The landscape of her grief is so linear, so sequential, the resolution of her memory so crystal clear, one could almost pluck out the line breaks and emerge with a beautifully written paragraph, a very short memoir in which nothing is wasted, but that is not verse:

At first I think she is calling a child, my neighbor, leaning through her doorway at dusk, street lamps just starting to hum the backdrop of evening.

If the mysteriousness of poetry is lacking, its music is not. Drawing on the blues and the spiritual, Trethewey employs the mournful perfectness of the triple rhyme, the emphatic cry of repetition. She knows lyrics ought to be brief and appreciates that the silences of what remains unsaid in poems about remembrance are just as powerful as what's included - even if that means that some things are lost to time.