It is fitting that the publication day of Natasha Trethewey’s ambitious and sweeping Monument: New and Selected Poems fell on the day after Election Day. While I don’t really think of Trethewey’s poems as directly pointing toward electoral politics, I do think of them as helping us make sense of events, both recent and historical, that we continue to live (and die) within. Her poems take on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the complexities of miscegenation and the civil war. They address mixed-race families and domestic abuse. They confront gun violence. They engage faith. But most of all, they empower language to articulate that which we choose not to say or can’t say. They speak for those who will not or cannot speak for themselves.
Trethewey’s career trajectory is impressive. She is the author of four collections of poems, a chapbook, and a book of prose, and she has served as the Poet Laureate of the United States for two terms, beginning in 2012, and as editor of Best American Poetry (2017). Her first book, Domestic Work, which was chosen by Rita Dove for the Cave Canum prize, was published in 2000; its appearance on the front stoop of the new millennium is somehow prescient not only of her talent but also of this era’s complicated relationship with race and gender.
Domestic Work begins with a poem about a photograph, and two years later, Trethewey will return to that ekphrastic muse in her most beguiling collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia. A sort of novella-in-verse about the many (mixed-race) prostitutes photographed by EJ Bellocq in New Orleans’ Red Light District in the early 1900s. Trethewey’s most celebrated collection, Native Guard, appeared in 2007 (her first with Houghton Mifflin) and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, cementing her reputation as someone able to merge, as well as any living poet, personal and racial tragedies. With Thrall, which appeared five years later in 2012, Trethewey returned to her interest in portraiture from the past. That same year, she published a captivating book of prose called Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. More poems about Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina appear in one of my favorites of her books, a brilliant chapbook called Congregation, which was released in 2015 from Dryad Press.
And now Monument, a smartly curated sampling from each of these books of poetry, plus eleven new poems. Monument feels particularly cohesive for a selected poems because Trethewey has arranged the book so that the final poem in each section connects with the first poem of the subsequent section. While her work has always seemed of a piece, the organizational design of Monument accentuates the many ways Trethewey’s poems seek to re-center the marginalized. In fact, Trethewey has spent her career writing poems about people who do not normally appear in poems.
For good reason, that aboutness has characterized how people tend to talk about her work. Put another way, Trethewey has emerged as a poet whose themes seem to precede her craft. This is in part because her books actually have themes — they are more than mere collections of poems. That gives her poetry an arc, a narrative, that makes them easier to approach. Trethewey also has a fondness (and a gift for) the persona poem. In this way, she reminds me of both Rita Dove and Ai. Like Dove, Trethewey is drawn to fictional and actual figures from the past. She likes giving them voice. She likes telling their stories. Wait, correct that — she likes letting them tell their own stories, as in a poem like “Countess P—‘s Advice for New Girls.” In this poem from Bellocq’s Ophelia, a Madame instructs new prostitutes on what to expect and what to do:
You’ll see
yourself a hundred times. For our customers
you must learn to be watched. Empty
your thoughts — think, if you do, only
of your swelling purse. Hold still as if
you sit for a painting. Catch light
in the hollow of your throat; let shadow dwell
in your navel and beneath the curve
of your breasts. See yourself through his eyes —
Few contemporary poets have written more about looking or being seen. Here the power dynamics of the gaze, of what is both visible and invisible, are complicated. Ralph Ellison explored similar issues of invisibility and power in The Invisible Man, but here, Trethewey intensifies these concerns through the inverse tensions of fragility and power that the racialized female body carries. The poem ends hauntingly:
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.
Become what you must. Let him see whatever
he needs. Train yourself not to look back.
Who has the power? Who’s act of looking leads to greater blindness? Can one look and not look back?
Trethewey’s insightful conflation of aesthetics and power reversal, her interest in the motif of reflection—both in the camera’s lens and in the mind’s eye—animates almost all of her work. Rereading her poems in this new collection, I realized how many of them begin with those twin modes of reflection. Take, for instance, the poem “Help, 1968,” one of the most memorable poem from Thrall. The poem’s point of departure is a photograph from The Americans by Robert Frank. Here are the opening stanzas:
When I see Frank’s photograph
of a white infant in the dark arms
of a woman who must be the maid,
I think of my mother and the year
we spent alone—my father at sea.
The woman stands in profile, back
against a wall, holding her charge,
their faces side by side—the look
on the child’s face strangely prescient,
a tiny furrow in the space
between her brows. Neither of them
looks toward the camera; nor
do they look at each other. That year,
when my mother took me for walks,
she was mistaken again and again
for my maid.
Consider the motifs of sight, the heavy metaphorics of looking in the final eight lines, that one word used three times. There is the poet looking at the photograph, which causes the poet to look to her past, and then there is the look on the face, the not looking at the camera, the not looking at each other. What, the speaker seems to be asking, do we see when we see? But also, what do we not look at when we reflect? What does Frank see? What does the reader see when she imagines the photograph, the poet, the maid, the baby, the young Trethewey, the less young mother? The looks of the mother, the looks of the passersby. The look of the reader at the poem on the page.
What I admire most in Trethewey’s oeuvre is her commitment to figuring out poetic ways of making the unseen seen and the unheard listened to. To accomplish this, the poem has to function as much as story as poem. Formally, this means the poems cannot risk being structurally jarring or syntactically destabilizing. Finely crafted, Trethewey’s poems are marked by an easy lyricism. Their power comes not in their linguistic pyrotechnics but in their insight, in their ability to connect seemingly disparate ideas, often through unexpected turns of phrase. In “My Mother Dreams of Another Country,” she describes her mother’s pregnancy as “the molehill of her own swelling.” In “Miscegenation,” a brilliant ghazal, we see “a train slicing the white glaze of winter.” In “Thrall,” she notes in a painting “the sudden taste of iron / a glimpse of red / like a wound opening / the robes of the pope.” In “Gathering,” the poet tells us “we take / what we need of light.” In “Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky,” the poet describes the laugh of her pregnant mother: “the sounds in my mother’s throat / rippling down into my blood.” Trethewey is sneaky. She is a master of surprise. You never know when the shutter of her poems will click. Trethewey’s poems want to be understood, yes, but like the photographs she writes about, her poems also want to be seen as something beyond what they convey. They want to be noticed for their composition, their mixture of dark and light tones, their masterful grasp of what is revealed and what is hidden.
One of those hidden details Trethewey keeps hoping to excavate is what her mother, who was black, was thinking and feeling as she was pregnant with Trethewey, whose father was white. Their mixed-race marriage was illegal in Mississippi, and so Trethewey’s existence, her birth, her light skin color, was sure to be problematic. Many of the poems in this volume let us see Trethewey looking back at her mother looking ahead — “Miscegenation,” “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971,” “The Southern Crescent,” “Self-Employment, 1970,” “Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky,” and “My Mother Dreams of Another Country.” The latter begins:
Already the words are changing. She is changing
from colored to negro, black still years ahead.
This is 1966 — she is married to a white man —
and there are more names for what grows inside her.
One can only imagine Trethewey’s mother watching 1960’s America change as she watches her own body change. Many years later, when the poet’s mother is murdered by her ex-husband, Trethewey sees the final portrait of her mother by way of Miguel Cabrera’s 1763 portrait of Saint Gertrude in the absolutely stunning poem, “Articulation,” one of the great poems of this decade. In 2016, not long after I read this poem in The Atlantic, I asked Trethewey if we could publish it in Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, which I co-edited with Brian Clements and Alexandra Teague. Fortunately for us all, she agreed. I still remember being stunned by the poem and in particular the final stanzas:
Three weeks gone, my mother came to me
in a dream, her body whole again but for
one perfect wound, the singular articulation
of all of them: a hole, center of her forehead,
the size of a wafer — light pouring from it.
How, then, could I not answer her life
with mine, she who saved me with hers?
And how could I not — bathed in the light
of her wound — find my calling there?
Again, across time and memory, across race and gender, portraits, bodies, perspectives and perceptions, poetry and purpose, collapse. In Congregation, there is a poem called “Watcher” about the poet’s brother watching everything after Katrina, whether it was rescue vehicles, looters, a cell phone signal, and even his fellow citizens:
At the church, handing out diapers and water,
he watched the people line up, watched their faces
as they watched his. And when at last there was work,
he got a job on the beach, as a watcher.
Behind safety goggles, he watched the sand for bones,
searched for debris that clogged great machines . . .
It was a kind of faith, that watching:
my brother trained his eyes to bear
the sharp erasure of sand and glass, prayed
there’d be nothing more to see.
I think of Trethewey’s poetic career as a mode of intense, unwavering, lyrical watching. She watches the past so we don’t forget it. She watches the future so we might know it. She watches language so we might learn it. She watches herself watch her memory of her mother. She watches America. She watches poetry. Like her brother, her watching is a kind of faith, faith in poetry a monument.
[Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on November 6, 2018. 208 pages, $26.00 hardcover]