Natasha Trethewey is a contemporary American poet born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned her M.A. in poetry at Hollins University and her M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Massachusetts.
Trethewey is the author of three successful books of poems: Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove for the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet; Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), which received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize; and Native Guard, for which Trethewey was named the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She currently teaches creative writing at Emory University in Georgia.
Domestic Work
Trethewey's debut collection of poems, Domestic Work, rings clear and true the timbre of her poetic voice. Using both traditional form and free verse, she captures with graceful attentiveness the perspective of the early black Americans who defined a nation by their work and suffering in mere glimpses and snatches of conversation. From the resurrected voices of wash women and cabbage vendors speaking through ancient photographs to the more personally revitalized voices of grandmother, mother, and self, Trethewey adopts the breath of generations to sing in low, blue tones of the beauty of suffering.
Rita Dove, in her introduction to the book, writes that "Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts – reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength."
Indeed, with Domestic Work, Trethewey grasps the camera lens of memory and focuses it on her own life as a girl, then woman of mixed race not to dawdle in autobiography, but to offer the gift of memory as a means of perceiving--and thus an introduction to understanding--our personal and national identities.
Bellocq's Ophelia
Trethewey's second book, Bellocq's Ophelia, delves into the heart and mind of one subject of E.J. Bellocq's Storyville Portraits, his early 1900's collection of photographs taken of prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. Trethewey gives her the name Ophelia, and in poem after poem she gives her a voice as well. Through a series of free verse letters and a sonnet sequence of diary entries, Ophelia reveals the folly of expectation; despite her inglorious vocation and her naked appearance, Ophelia proves to be an admirable woman robed in intelligence and independent fortitude. Trethewey's growing expertise in form is evident in this collection, but it perhaps reaches full maturity in her third book.
Native Guard
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in Poetry, Native Guard is the standing monument to Trethewey's mastery of poetic voice and form. It stands not only as monument to this, though; it at once memorializes the sacrifices made by the Louisiana Native Guard, the first black regiment of the Union Army; the premature loss of a mother; and what we all stand to lose with the loss of legacy, as well as what we gain from the sorrow and goodness of its memory.
Trethewey engages in a number of traditional forms in this collection, including the ghazal and sonnet crown, in addition to using more unconventional forms to reflect the tone of the piece, including a palindrome and the mournful repetition of the Delta blues. Native Guard, with all its beauty of feeling and form, assuredly leaves its audience panting for Trethewey's next book.
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