By Lisa McMurtray. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 25)
As the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard and the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, Natasha Trethewey’s poetry is familiar to many readers. Her work is full-bodied and blooded, textured by a painter’s eye yet lyrically told, and the canon of American poetry is better for her contributions. This timely collection, featuring selections from her previous four books of poetry and single chapbook, is the perfect addition to her oeuvre.
Monument opens with a kind of instruction manual for how to read this collection of old and new poems. “Ask yourself what’s in your heart,” she writes, “that / reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and contend with what it means.” This book, at its heart, is history contended—personal history, certainly, but also the history of a complicated southern landscape and Trethewey’s place within its legacy.
Structured as a call and response, each section of this powerful collection explores a neglected history: working-class African Americans in the South (“Domestic Work”), an imagined mixed-race prostitute in early 1900s New Orleans (“Bellocq’s Ophelia”), her murdered mother and the many stories of the unrepresented citizens of the Jim Crow south (“Native Guard”), the ravaged lives of those affected by Katrina (“Congregation”), narratives inspired by paintings and photographs (“Thrall”), and the hole left in her life by her mother’s early death.
Richly populated by a diverse cast and a meticulous, musical landscape, the poems collected in Monument are as beautiful as they are haunting. Trethewey’s voice is a powerful testament to the marginalized and the spaces they inhabit. From “clotheslines sagged with linens” and post-Katrina “vacant lots and open fields” to the “divine language” of Juan de Pareja’s paintings in 17th century Spain, Monument offers new narratives while reframing history.
The first section of “Meditation at Decatur Square” ends with what feels to be the core of this book:
Here is only the history of a word,
obelisk,
that points us toward
what’s not there; all of it
palimpsest, each mute object
repeating a single refrain:
Remember this.
Each poem is a monument, an obelisk, that asks readers to remember and to hear for the first time, to imagine or truly see. These poems act as a clarion call to the reader as much as Trethewey herself, whose professor told her that perhaps she “should / write about something else, unburden / yourself of the death of your mother.” In response, Trethewey rewrites her mother—and the people of past and paintings—back into the narrative. She, like her father, “is Orpheus / trying to bring her back with the music / of his words.” In another poem, she cites a Korean proverb: “you carry her corpse on your back.”
History is important to Trethewey, but history is also malleable. “In paint / a story can change,” she writes, “mistakes be undone.” Stories change in each retelling. People are forgotten or erased, words made better or worse, intentions change. Remembering isn’t a strict adherence to the record, but something deeper, more meaningful. Remembering is harder than fact. It is inhabiting and rewriting. Trethewey slips into new narratives as easily and naturally as breathing. Whether it’s a 16th century painting or her grandmother in the 1930s, Trethewey masterfully weaves new stories that are always, at their heart, painfully true. “This is the place to which I vowed / I’d never return,” she writes in one of the final poems, but she does it anyway and we thank her.
Born and raised in Jackson, Lisa McMurtray holds an MFA from Florida State University and an MA in English from Mississippi State University. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch and The Journal.
Natasha Trethewey will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 in conversation with Beth Ann Fennelley at 4:00 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.
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