Native Guard

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.

Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.

The title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked in African American history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.

The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey’s life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory in this exploration of personal history, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.

Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection, a landmark of modern Southern literature, is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection masterfully explores:

• Civil War Poetry: The forgotten history of the Louisiana Native Guards, a Black regiment assigned to guard Confederate prisoners on Mississippi’s Ship Island.
• Poems About Grief: A heartbreaking and powerful tribute to the author’s mother, reclaiming her memory years after her tragic death.
• Black History: A searing look at the racial legacy of the Deep South through the lens of one family’s experience with an illegal interracial marriage in 1960s Mississippi.
• American Poetry: Lyrical and haunting verse from a former U.S. Poet Laureate that weaves personal and national history into a single, unforgettable narrative.
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