Native Guard

January 23, 2006
Trethewey (Domestic Work
) draws on the life of her deceased mother and on the history of Mississippi, where the poet and her mother's family grew up, to limn a multiracial South and her own multiracial heritage. One poem tries to preserve her mother's memory ("certain the sounds I make/ are enough to call someone home"); the title poem's set of linked sonnets, where the last line of each one becomes the first line of the next, presents black Union soldiers who "keep/ white men as prisoners—rebel soldiers,/ would-be masters." A pantoun remembers the night Trethewey's family discovered a burning cross on her lawn; the concluding poem condenses the poet's mixed—and compelling—feelings about "Mississippi, state that made a crime// of me—mulatto, half-breed, native—/ in my native land, this place they'll bury me."

The Alliance Theatre of Atlanta has created a dramatic version of Trethewey's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, and it is a marvelous presentation of the poetry. January LaVoy is The Poet, reading the works that Trethewey wrote for and about her mother, and Thomas Neal Antwon Ghant is The Native Guard, representing the men who traded service in the Union army for freedom from slavery. Both narrators have a deep understanding of the poems they read and the dramatic skill to convey them. The music that punctuates the performance is well chosen and well performed, adding still more to the emotional experience. Trethewey, who was twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, is a fine reader of her own work, but this presentation has found a way to go an interpretive step further. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine