Voice in Natasha Tretheway's Native Guard
In Native Guard, former United States Poet Laureate, Natasha Tretheway, presents a collection of poems from a variety of voices. The poems, arranged in mostly, a logical order presents historical and personal memories intertwined with the tales of her parents, her childhood, a black regiment of the civil war, and post-civil war struggles. The author was born in Mississippi to white and black parents, and it is primarily from this voice she writes, as a child, an adult, and a time-traveling historian. Much of the material in her poems comes from slavery, the struggle against racism, her parent’s troubles as a mixed raced couple, and the difficulties in postwar southern United States. This essay will discuss the author’s use of these different voices within her poems to express herself.
The inspiration for the name of her…show more content… Then later, she described how children often think only of themselves while not noticing other events occurring around them, “Walking home all those years ago, I knew nothing of Narcissus or the daffodil’s short spring” (7).
In another poem, "Graveyard Blues," Tretheway visits her mother’s neglected gravesite and discovers there’s no headstone and surmises the gravestone sunk down to become a pillow for her mother’s head. Earlier in the poem, in a daughter’s voice, she describes her memories during her mother's burial with deep thoughts and meaningful verse such as "It rained the whole time we were laying her down" (8). At some point during the visit when she lays down in the graveyard and thinks of her mother, "I wander now among name of the dead; My mother's name, stone pillow for my
