Native Guard

Native Guard weaves a personal elegy for Natasha Trethewey's murdered mother together with the buried history of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all Black regiment in the Union Army made up largely of formerly enslaved men who were assigned to guard Confederate prisoners of war, a history whose own name gives the book its title and refuses euphemism for what these soldiers actually did. Moving between those two stories, one intimate and one historical, the book insists that American history and Trethewey's own biracial Southern identity cannot be pulled apart from each other.

The book moves fluidly between formal modes, including a central sonnet sequence and passages of villanelle, and free verse, letting the discipline of received form carry the historical material while looser lines carry the more immediate personal grief. That grief has a specific source: Trethewey's mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was murdered in 1985 by her second husband when the poet was nineteen, and the poet has said that loss was the moment she both felt she would become a poet and understood what poetry could actually be for.

Reading Native Guard means holding two kinds of memory at once, the intimate memory of a lost mother and the larger, long suppressed memory of Black soldiers whose service the Confederacy's own history worked to erase, and watching Trethewey refuse to treat either as more important than the other. It suits a reader interested in how a poet can make personal elegy and historical recovery serve each other rather than competing for the same page.