What do you think?
Rate this book
Thrall
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Poetry (2012)The stunning follow-up volume to her 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning Native Guard, by America’s new Poet Laureate
Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical—exploring her own interracial and complicated roots—and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history. Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.
Thrall confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.
Natasha Trethewey’s poems are at once deeply personal and historical—exploring her own interracial and complicated roots—and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history. Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate Thrall, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.
Thrall confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.
84 pages, Hardcover
First published August 28, 2012
About the author
Natasha Trethewey
37 books765 followersNatasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.
Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".
Natasha Trethewey's father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.
Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.
Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 224 reviews
March 10, 2015
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.
Born to a black mother and a white father, Poet Laureate (2012-14) Natasha Trethewey's poems explore history through a personal and racial lens, while still managing to remain inclusive. How does it feel, to be the child of an interracial family, and most importantly, what does this mean when viewing the history of the American fabric? It's not too often that you get history dispersed through poetry. I was fascinated by this, and also by Trethewey's way of stringing together words that form narrative through verse:
like the woman in the photograph
she must have seemed, carrying me
each day - white in her arms - as if
she were a prop: a black backdrop,
the dark foil in this American story.
Ever heard of the myth of the "Miracle of the Black Leg?" At the risk of straying for a second, I will pause to say this: in order to learn whether something similar has been of historical merit, all you have to do is read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The second poem in this collection is based off the famous "pictorial representations...and the myth of the miracle transplant- black donor, white recipient:"
Most of these poems were written while Tretheway, an English professor at Emory University, took some time off, with the help of research and writing fellowships, to research historical paintings dealing with identity. "Blood" was one of my favorites, especially after gazing at the painting itself, and then reading and rereading the poetic exemplification (excerpted):
It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer
upon her, framed as she is in the painting's
romantic glow, her melancholic beauty
meant to show the pathos of her condition:
black blood - that she cannot transcend it.
Words placed together in a triumphant song and called poetry, always manage to play my heart's strings. It's such a shame that I couldn't properly attach a visual of the portrait from which the poem was derived (struggled with the image coding): George Fuller's painting, "Quadroon."However, no poem in this collection touched me more deeply than "Illumination." Forget punctuation, the form used here breaks even between lines, its spaces offering its own rules, its form suggestive of creative survival. "Illumination" was a sound illumine for me and it's a pity that I can't include excerpts from it here, because GoodReads formatting does not allow for keeping the breaks in certain poetic forms. I can only suggest that you get a copy for yourself, as I owe profuse thanks to my GR friend Douglas for sending me a copy and changing the way I view structure and themes in poetry (see his brilliant review of this collection here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
July 23, 2019
The first half of Trethewey's earlier work, Native Guard, consists of poems about her mother. Here, about half of the poems are in some way about her father: their separations; their connections, through fishing, through story.
The other half, the ekphrastic poetry, reflects upon identity, in general terms and in particular ones, in relation to her father mostly, but also to her mother and of course herself.
There's the connection she sees between Help, 1968, a photograph by Walker Evans-influenced Robert Frank; and the reactions engendered by her mother's taking her, as a baby, for walks alone, while her father was away for a year at sea.
http://www.theasc.com/blog/2009/09/21...
http://southernspaces.org/2010/congre...
Several of the ekphrastic poems speak to casta paintings, visual portrayals of the taxonomy of the unions of colonial Mexico, as if people were a + b = c, a + c = d, or even a + e = Torna Atrás.
De Español y Negra; Mulata by Miguel Cabrera, c. 1763
The brilliant final poem "Illumination" brings it all together, though I recommend returning to the beginning to reread Elegy (for my father).
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey with her father, poet Eric Trethewey, who died last year.
The other half, the ekphrastic poetry, reflects upon identity, in general terms and in particular ones, in relation to her father mostly, but also to her mother and of course herself.
There's the connection she sees between Help, 1968, a photograph by Walker Evans-influenced Robert Frank; and the reactions engendered by her mother's taking her, as a baby, for walks alone, while her father was away for a year at sea.
http://www.theasc.com/blog/2009/09/21... http://southernspaces.org/2010/congre...Several of the ekphrastic poems speak to casta paintings, visual portrayals of the taxonomy of the unions of colonial Mexico, as if people were a + b = c, a + c = d, or even a + e = Torna Atrás.
De Español y Negra; Mulata by Miguel Cabrera, c. 1763
The brilliant final poem "Illumination" brings it all together, though I recommend returning to the beginning to reread Elegy (for my father).
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey with her father, poet Eric Trethewey, who died last year.
January 11, 2015
Until I'm convinced otherwise, I think Natasha Trethewey is the greatest living poet in America. (This is my personal opinion, of course.) Her collection Native Guard was one of the top books I read in 2014 and certainly the best poetry collection I read. At the end of this year, I expect Thrall to be in the top as well.
Here, Trethewey examines personal history, race, and the colonial views of interracial relationships depicted in art. Trethewey was born to a black mother and white father and raised in the South.
David St. John blurbed on the back, "This remarkable collection carries the reader from troubling ekphrastic reflections upon colonial depictions of mixed race-meditations of superbly nuances cultural and historical resonance-to a stunningly personal album of self-portraits of the poet with her father. Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal histories felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound."
Many of these poems are reflections of colonial art pieces depicting mixed race children. Trethewey references each painting in the title, so I was able to Google image and view each painting as I read. This made for an obviously remarkable experience. It was like getting a Trethewey-guided tour through an art museum.
Here's what I don't understand. Trethewey was the Poet Laureate of the U.S. when this collection was published. This at a time when we have a President of mixed race and racial tensions are arguably at the highest they've been since the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, there's under 500 reviews of this work on Goodreads? This at a time when all the high schools in America are teaching "a road less travelled".
This is a travesty. I believe this collection and Native Guard should be taught in every high school and read widely. We should all know about Trethewey and we should have her as a pundit on all the news programs.
If you have access to any sort of bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, go get her work. Now. Today. It's important, timely, and as close to pinpointing the conflagration of racial tension in this country as anything I've ever read.
Here's an enlightenment about Jefferson, that "great founding father":
Enlightenment
In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:
his forehead white with illumination —
a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,
darkened as if the artist meant to contrast
his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.
By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,
he was already linked to an affair
with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue
and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems
to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out
across the centuries, his lips fixed as if
he's just uttered some final word.
The first time I saw the painting, I listened
as my father explained the contradictions:
how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out
of necessity, my father said — had to own
slaves; that his moral philosophy meant
he could not have fathered those children:
would have been impossible, my father said.
For years we debated the distance between
word and deed. I'd follow my father from book
to book, gathering citations, listening
as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —
each flower and tree and bird as if to prove
a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater
than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.
I did not know then the subtext
of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —
the improvement of the blacks in body
and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites — or that my father could believe
he'd made me better. When I think of this now,
I see how the past holds us captive,
its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:
my young father, a rough outline of the old man
he's become, needing to show me
the better measure of his heart, an equation
writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.
Now, we take in how much has changed:
talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,
How white was she? — parsing the fractions
as if to name what made her worthy
of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,
quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.
Imagine stepping back into the past,
our guide tells us then — and I can't resist
whispering to my father: This is where
we split up. I'll head around to the back.
When he laughs, I know he's grateful
I've made a joke of it, this history
that links us — white father, black daughter —
even as it renders us other to each other.
See Annette Gordon-ReedThe Hemingses of Monticello for more of this story.
Here, Trethewey examines personal history, race, and the colonial views of interracial relationships depicted in art. Trethewey was born to a black mother and white father and raised in the South.
David St. John blurbed on the back, "This remarkable collection carries the reader from troubling ekphrastic reflections upon colonial depictions of mixed race-meditations of superbly nuances cultural and historical resonance-to a stunningly personal album of self-portraits of the poet with her father. Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal histories felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound."
Many of these poems are reflections of colonial art pieces depicting mixed race children. Trethewey references each painting in the title, so I was able to Google image and view each painting as I read. This made for an obviously remarkable experience. It was like getting a Trethewey-guided tour through an art museum.
Here's what I don't understand. Trethewey was the Poet Laureate of the U.S. when this collection was published. This at a time when we have a President of mixed race and racial tensions are arguably at the highest they've been since the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, there's under 500 reviews of this work on Goodreads? This at a time when all the high schools in America are teaching "a road less travelled".
This is a travesty. I believe this collection and Native Guard should be taught in every high school and read widely. We should all know about Trethewey and we should have her as a pundit on all the news programs.
If you have access to any sort of bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, go get her work. Now. Today. It's important, timely, and as close to pinpointing the conflagration of racial tension in this country as anything I've ever read.
Here's an enlightenment about Jefferson, that "great founding father":
Enlightenment
In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs
at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:
his forehead white with illumination —
a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,
darkened as if the artist meant to contrast
his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.
By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,
he was already linked to an affair
with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue
and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems
to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out
across the centuries, his lips fixed as if
he's just uttered some final word.
The first time I saw the painting, I listened
as my father explained the contradictions:
how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out
of necessity, my father said — had to own
slaves; that his moral philosophy meant
he could not have fathered those children:
would have been impossible, my father said.
For years we debated the distance between
word and deed. I'd follow my father from book
to book, gathering citations, listening
as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —
each flower and tree and bird as if to prove
a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater
than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.
I did not know then the subtext
of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —
the improvement of the blacks in body
and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites — or that my father could believe
he'd made me better. When I think of this now,
I see how the past holds us captive,
its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:
my young father, a rough outline of the old man
he's become, needing to show me
the better measure of his heart, an equation
writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.
Now, we take in how much has changed:
talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,
How white was she? — parsing the fractions
as if to name what made her worthy
of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,
quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.
Imagine stepping back into the past,
our guide tells us then — and I can't resist
whispering to my father: This is where
we split up. I'll head around to the back.
When he laughs, I know he's grateful
I've made a joke of it, this history
that links us — white father, black daughter —
even as it renders us other to each other.
See Annette Gordon-ReedThe Hemingses of Monticello for more of this story.
January 26, 2013
I purchased my copy when Ms. Trethewey read at the main New Orleans Public Library in December of 2012. I didn't buy the book simply because I was impressed by the way she read the collection (I was) or because of how cool it was to get a book signed by the current Poet Laureate of the United States (it was pretty cool). I got Thrall because I was intrigued by the conceit behind it: a "mixed race" person dissects the historical attitudes of western culture toward such people and, occasionally, uses her own youth as a launching point into the exploration.
She does not disappoint. I was enthralled enough to read the book in one sitting, even though I wanted to save some for later. Most of Trethewey's poems are ekphrastic (i.e. she examines a visual work of art, most often here paintings, and builds her pieces from on them) and it was a great help to have the paintings nearby (thank you Google/Wikipedia/Internet) to follow her eyes, mind, and soul as she mulled over "The Miracle of the Black Leg" and the series of "Casta" poems. (The Casta was a colonial Spanish caste system whereby Enlightenment era Spaniards classified humans according to the color of their skin or ethnic background. A Spanish man and a negro woman produced a mulatto. A "mulatto-returning-backwards" (the dark child of light-skinned or white parentage) and a standard mulatto produced a "no-te-entiendo" (translation: "I don't understand you"). And so on. She recasts her white father, black mother, and herself as figures in the various paintings and, by doing so, makes her personal situation representative of western views on race. One particularly affecting poem relies on an 1864 chalk drawing where four scientists dissect a beautiful corpse to discovery the secret of the drowned woman's beauty. There's nothing overtly racial about the drawing. Yet, she substitutes herself for the body and places her father in the skin of the man with the scalpel to stunning effect. She is able to eviscerate the hypocrisy of the Enlightenment age and her enlightened poet dad in one flick of the knife blade.
The poems where she explores her relationship with her deceased father without the benefit of ekprasis are less compelling, but they only suffer by comparison. They are, by their nature, simpler, more direct, but not without their own charms.
This is an important collection and well worth reading in the age of post-racialism.
She does not disappoint. I was enthralled enough to read the book in one sitting, even though I wanted to save some for later. Most of Trethewey's poems are ekphrastic (i.e. she examines a visual work of art, most often here paintings, and builds her pieces from on them) and it was a great help to have the paintings nearby (thank you Google/Wikipedia/Internet) to follow her eyes, mind, and soul as she mulled over "The Miracle of the Black Leg" and the series of "Casta" poems. (The Casta was a colonial Spanish caste system whereby Enlightenment era Spaniards classified humans according to the color of their skin or ethnic background. A Spanish man and a negro woman produced a mulatto. A "mulatto-returning-backwards" (the dark child of light-skinned or white parentage) and a standard mulatto produced a "no-te-entiendo" (translation: "I don't understand you"). And so on. She recasts her white father, black mother, and herself as figures in the various paintings and, by doing so, makes her personal situation representative of western views on race. One particularly affecting poem relies on an 1864 chalk drawing where four scientists dissect a beautiful corpse to discovery the secret of the drowned woman's beauty. There's nothing overtly racial about the drawing. Yet, she substitutes herself for the body and places her father in the skin of the man with the scalpel to stunning effect. She is able to eviscerate the hypocrisy of the Enlightenment age and her enlightened poet dad in one flick of the knife blade.
The poems where she explores her relationship with her deceased father without the benefit of ekprasis are less compelling, but they only suffer by comparison. They are, by their nature, simpler, more direct, but not without their own charms.
This is an important collection and well worth reading in the age of post-racialism.
July 9, 2024
Tretheway's Thrall is full of gorgeous poetry. And yet, when I review my notes for this review, I wrote first that the work in this collection is "not beautiful," but is "stunning and startling in its use of form, line break, and many other techniques..." I can only understand this early apprehension of mine as naive, maybe fearful of discomfort and growth. Tretheway's courage to defy traditional forms and experiment defines her poetry and uplifts her message: I'm here and I matter.
Tretheway's use of form is signature: I recognize the tradition but I am something different from it, says this experimentation. The untraditional stanza shape and sizes, ending midsentence, line breaks in unexpected places, familiar forms adapted, and more. For examples, see "Taxonomy" on p22-3 and "Rotation" p55.
Using pieces of art depicting people of color throughout history from the distortion of a white lens, Tretheway writes descriptive and revelatory after-poems. Tretheway is a mixed race poet, so many of these poems take on an incredibly personal narrative for her: one part of herself writing to the other, or herself as black daughter writing to her white father. These poems are wrought with emotion and technical greatness; my favorite of this type is "Kitchen Maid" p27. This whole book communicates revelatory racial truths that amaze me to the point of awe. "Thrall" p59-65 for example changed forever the way I think about freedom and servitude.
A few personal favorite pieces in this collection are "Geography 2" p46, which treats time in a beautiful, captivating way, particularly in the last 3 lines; and "Geography 3" p47 and "How the Past" p72, both of which are lovely examples of metapoetry.
If you love poetry for beauty, you will love this collection. If you love poetry for technique, you will love this collection. If you don't know if you love poetry, but you want to find out, I recommend this collection as a great place to jump in. Thrall is not only one of my favorite poetry collections now, but one of my favorite books of all time.
Tretheway's use of form is signature: I recognize the tradition but I am something different from it, says this experimentation. The untraditional stanza shape and sizes, ending midsentence, line breaks in unexpected places, familiar forms adapted, and more. For examples, see "Taxonomy" on p22-3 and "Rotation" p55.
Using pieces of art depicting people of color throughout history from the distortion of a white lens, Tretheway writes descriptive and revelatory after-poems. Tretheway is a mixed race poet, so many of these poems take on an incredibly personal narrative for her: one part of herself writing to the other, or herself as black daughter writing to her white father. These poems are wrought with emotion and technical greatness; my favorite of this type is "Kitchen Maid" p27. This whole book communicates revelatory racial truths that amaze me to the point of awe. "Thrall" p59-65 for example changed forever the way I think about freedom and servitude.
A few personal favorite pieces in this collection are "Geography 2" p46, which treats time in a beautiful, captivating way, particularly in the last 3 lines; and "Geography 3" p47 and "How the Past" p72, both of which are lovely examples of metapoetry.
If you love poetry for beauty, you will love this collection. If you love poetry for technique, you will love this collection. If you don't know if you love poetry, but you want to find out, I recommend this collection as a great place to jump in. Thrall is not only one of my favorite poetry collections now, but one of my favorite books of all time.
November 9, 2020
Rotation
Like the moon that night, my father —
a distant body, white and luminous.
How small I was back then,
looking up as if from dark earth.
Distant, his body white and luminous,
my father stood in the doorway.
Looking up as if from dark earth,
I saw him outlined in a scrim of light.
My father stood in the doorway
as if to watch over me as I dreamed.
When I saw him outlined — a scrim of light —
he was already waning, turning to go.
Once, he watched over me as I dreamed.
How small I was. Back then,
he was already turning to go, waning
like the moon that night — my father.
December 1, 2012
In this slender collection of poems, Trethewey takes us backward and forward in time, establishing Thrall as a collection as much about past as it is about present---or rather, how the two are inextricably linked through history, through identity, and in discovering truth and self and meaning. The collection’s first poem, “Elegy,” reflects the poet’s longing---a sometimes ruthless longing---to make sense of and (re)discover the world.
As the child of a black woman and white man, Trethewey boldly confronts issues of racial identity, cultural and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and the shifts in the landscape of racial understanding through history. Trethewey wrote in a previous poem that history, or the ghost of history, “lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm”; in Thrall, she seems to give in to that embrace, take on that ghost, and give it a new face. In “Taxonomy,” a series of poems based on 18th-century casta paintings by Juan Rodriguez Juarez, Trethewey pairs an examination of mixed race---which Trethewey terms in one instance “an equation of blood”---with mixed tongues, pairing English and Spanish to blend her form to content. Through a written representation of the Enlightenment era’s fascination with taxonomy---which included racial and ethnographic categorizations and distinctions, and the perceived exotica of mixed-blood couplings---Trethewey allows us to witness an historical fascination with what were perceived as at once exotic and colonized blacks. Trethewey captures both this fascination and the somewhat hostile undertones---the heavy “weight of blood,” a mother contorting in paired watchfulness of her mixed-race child and perhaps wariness of the “transient” and “myopic” father—in a “catalog / of mixed blood.” Through a careful and raw examination of both a cultural and deeply personal history, she shows both the beauty and horrors of race, classifications, and (particularly mixed) heritage. (Read my full review at Our Lost Jungle)
As the child of a black woman and white man, Trethewey boldly confronts issues of racial identity, cultural and racial attitudes, stereotypes, and the shifts in the landscape of racial understanding through history. Trethewey wrote in a previous poem that history, or the ghost of history, “lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm”; in Thrall, she seems to give in to that embrace, take on that ghost, and give it a new face. In “Taxonomy,” a series of poems based on 18th-century casta paintings by Juan Rodriguez Juarez, Trethewey pairs an examination of mixed race---which Trethewey terms in one instance “an equation of blood”---with mixed tongues, pairing English and Spanish to blend her form to content. Through a written representation of the Enlightenment era’s fascination with taxonomy---which included racial and ethnographic categorizations and distinctions, and the perceived exotica of mixed-blood couplings---Trethewey allows us to witness an historical fascination with what were perceived as at once exotic and colonized blacks. Trethewey captures both this fascination and the somewhat hostile undertones---the heavy “weight of blood,” a mother contorting in paired watchfulness of her mixed-race child and perhaps wariness of the “transient” and “myopic” father—in a “catalog / of mixed blood.” Through a careful and raw examination of both a cultural and deeply personal history, she shows both the beauty and horrors of race, classifications, and (particularly mixed) heritage. (Read my full review at Our Lost Jungle)
January 1, 2023
It’s interesting how many of these poems are about pieces of art. Natasha Trethewey recreates each image by sculpting words so that your mind’s eye can envision the artwork without ever seeing it. This seems to encapsulate the essence of her poetry - Paint streaks across canvas become something magnificent once the final product is visible. It is something that takes your breath away.
Favorites:
Elegy
Knowledge
The Americans #3 Help
Geography
Torna Atrás
Bird in the House ***Top favorite***
On Happiness
Favorites:
Elegy
Knowledge
The Americans #3 Help
Geography
Torna Atrás
Bird in the House ***Top favorite***
On Happiness
December 5, 2020
I don't have any ideas worth adding to the many good reviews of this book but I want to contribute something so i've attempted to do below what Cheryl said she wanted to do in her excellent and top-rated-as-of-Dec-5-2020 review. I hope you enjoy the final poem (i hope!) pretty much as it appears in print (turn your smartphone sideways).
Illumination
Always there is something more to know
what lingers at the edge of thought
awaiting illumination as in
this secondhand book full
of annotations daring the margins in pencil
a light stroke as if
the writer of these small replies
meant not to leave them forever
meant to erase
evidence of this private interaction
Here a passage underlined there
a single star on the page
as in the night sky cloud-swept and hazy
where only the brightest appears
a tiny spark I follow
its coded message try to read in it
the direction of the solitary mind
that thought to pencil in
a jagged arrow It
is a bolt of lightning
where it strikes
I read the line over and over
as if I might discern
the little fires set
the flames of an idea licking the page
how knowledge burns Beyond
the exclamation point
its thin agreement angle of surprise
there are questions the word why
So much is left
untold Between
the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl
between what is said and not
white space framing the story
the way the past unwritten
eludes us So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting
December 25, 2013
In her introduction to the 1996 edition of The Best American Poetry, Adrienne Rich said:
It is from/of/about that mythic interface of whiteness and color that Natasha Trethewey writes her poetry. Trethewey is a poet immersed in history. If, as Charles Simic said in his intro to the 1992 BAP, “Lyric poets . . . assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe,” Trethewey’s work is grounded in the place where tribal history intersects the personal. In Native Guard, she examines history and her relationship to her African-American mother and in Thrall, she turns to her relationship with her white father.
She does this largely through the use of ekphrasis, a technique she used very successfully in Belloq’s Ophelia. Ophelia centered on photography, and Thrall uses 18th and 19th century paintings that depict the white patriarchy in relation with the colored races. She gives special attention to a series of 18th century Mexican casta paintings, a genre I didn’t know existed until I read this book.
A long poem called “Taxonomy,” examines a group of casta paintings by Juan Rodriguez Juarez from The Book of Castas. With titles like “De Espanol Y de India Produce Mestiso,” the paintings depict an elaborate racial caste system in which the father (always the Spaniard of course) moves further and further from the mixed-race child. Interspersed with the ekphrastic poems are a series of poems about her increasingly distant father. Her father is also a poet.
The words “thrall” and “enthrall” recur over and over in this book. “Thrall” means not just to be held in bondage but also to be morally or mentally enslaved. The title poem “Thrall,” is spoken in the persona of Juan de Pareja, a slave to the 17th century artist Diego Velazquez. Pareja was manumitted in 1650 and was himself an artist. The poem begins “He was not my father / though he might have been / I came to him / the mulatto son / of a slave woman / just that / as if it took only my mother / to make me / a mulatto / meaning / any white man / could be my father.”
In Thrall, Trethewey has given up her boxy sonnets for a dancing open free verse form very difficult to reproduce. This change in form, however, does not entail a change in tone. Linda Gregerson calls these "poems of exquisite tact." I'm not sure tact is something a poet strives to achieve, but there is a gentleness to the way Trethewey tells ugly truths.
I would say, without any authority whatsoever for saying so, that Trethewey’s prosody owes more to the Western canon than to the bluesy rap-like spoken word roots of a poet like Patricia Smith. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say Trethewey pulls her punches.
Thrall is book-ended by poems in which Trethewey goes fishing with her father – “the almost caught taunting our lines.” Fishing is an activity of such symbolic resonance that I won’t make any attempt to reduce them to specifics, except that the daughter seems to be protective of and longing toward the father.
Given the extreme racialization of our social and imaginative life, it’s a peculiar kind of alienation that presumes race and racism (always linked to power) will haunt poets of “color” only. Like riches and poverty, like anti-Semitism, whiteness and color have a mythic life that uncontrollably infiltrates poetic language even when unnamed . . . The assumptions behind "white" identity in a violently racialized society have their repercussions on poetry, on metaphor, on the civil life in which . . . all art is rooted.
It is from/of/about that mythic interface of whiteness and color that Natasha Trethewey writes her poetry. Trethewey is a poet immersed in history. If, as Charles Simic said in his intro to the 1992 BAP, “Lyric poets . . . assert the individual’s experience against that of the tribe,” Trethewey’s work is grounded in the place where tribal history intersects the personal. In Native Guard, she examines history and her relationship to her African-American mother and in Thrall, she turns to her relationship with her white father.
She does this largely through the use of ekphrasis, a technique she used very successfully in Belloq’s Ophelia. Ophelia centered on photography, and Thrall uses 18th and 19th century paintings that depict the white patriarchy in relation with the colored races. She gives special attention to a series of 18th century Mexican casta paintings, a genre I didn’t know existed until I read this book.
A long poem called “Taxonomy,” examines a group of casta paintings by Juan Rodriguez Juarez from The Book of Castas. With titles like “De Espanol Y de India Produce Mestiso,” the paintings depict an elaborate racial caste system in which the father (always the Spaniard of course) moves further and further from the mixed-race child. Interspersed with the ekphrastic poems are a series of poems about her increasingly distant father. Her father is also a poet.
The words “thrall” and “enthrall” recur over and over in this book. “Thrall” means not just to be held in bondage but also to be morally or mentally enslaved. The title poem “Thrall,” is spoken in the persona of Juan de Pareja, a slave to the 17th century artist Diego Velazquez. Pareja was manumitted in 1650 and was himself an artist. The poem begins “He was not my father / though he might have been / I came to him / the mulatto son / of a slave woman / just that / as if it took only my mother / to make me / a mulatto / meaning / any white man / could be my father.”
In Thrall, Trethewey has given up her boxy sonnets for a dancing open free verse form very difficult to reproduce. This change in form, however, does not entail a change in tone. Linda Gregerson calls these "poems of exquisite tact." I'm not sure tact is something a poet strives to achieve, but there is a gentleness to the way Trethewey tells ugly truths.
I would say, without any authority whatsoever for saying so, that Trethewey’s prosody owes more to the Western canon than to the bluesy rap-like spoken word roots of a poet like Patricia Smith. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say Trethewey pulls her punches.
Thrall is book-ended by poems in which Trethewey goes fishing with her father – “the almost caught taunting our lines.” Fishing is an activity of such symbolic resonance that I won’t make any attempt to reduce them to specifics, except that the daughter seems to be protective of and longing toward the father.
a glimpse of the unattainable—happiness
I would give my father if I could’
August 16, 2012
Natasha Trethewey, Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
Politicized poetry—and when I say “politicized”, I'm not just talking flat-out political poetry here, but also what one might call “the poetry of social consciousness”—is always a problematic thing. One hundred percent of the time. So much so that back when I was still a working poet and thus entitled in some small way to comment on such things and offer advice to the aspiring, when it came to politicized poetry, my advice was “don't”. Were I still in such a position, it still would be; in decades of reading poetry I've come across maybe one hundred poets who've managed to write a good politicized single poem. A handful of those have managed a full collection of politicized work. I have yet to come across a poet who has managed an entire career of good politicized poetry, though I have encountered two that have come a lot closer than anyone else. One is Carolyn Forche; the other is Natasha Trethewey.
Trethewey closes her newest book, published to coincide with the ceremony naming her the newest Poet Laureate of the United States, with a poem entitled “Illumination”, the final lines of which:
“...So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting”
Any writer is going to read those last few lines and have it resonate with him or her, but it packs an extra punch coming at the end of this book-length collection in which Trethewey frankly (and with a surprisingly unjaundiced eye) examines the fruits of what, in an earlier time, would have been called miscegination, both through ekphrastic poems examining seventeenth- and eighteenth century paintings and examining her relationship with her father. You can see where such a thing could go off the rails pretty easily, I trust, and yet Trethewey, much as she did in Native Guard, manages to tread a path through politicization that almost always remembers W. C. Williams' injunction to poets: “no ideas but in things.” You bring the images to the table, you lay them out, and you let the reader take away what he wants or needs to given his own baggage. I could choose lines at random to illustrate what I'm talking about, but one passage specifically struck me here as a sterling example of what I'm talking about, the final lines of the poem “Calling”, which describe a baptism (and how fraught with politicization is any religious topic?):
“...What comes back
is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface,
light filtered through water
closing over my head, my mother—her body
between me and the high sun, a corona of light
around her face. Why not call it
a vision? What I know is this:
I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;
someone pulled me through
the water's bright ceiling
and I rose, initiate,
from one life into another.”
Image. Image. Image. Narrator commentary on image is, again, rooted in image, in concreteness (“What I know is this:...”). Value judgments are rendered through word choice rather than being spelled out; Trethewey never overplays her hand here. This is the essence of excellent poetry. **** ½
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
Politicized poetry—and when I say “politicized”, I'm not just talking flat-out political poetry here, but also what one might call “the poetry of social consciousness”—is always a problematic thing. One hundred percent of the time. So much so that back when I was still a working poet and thus entitled in some small way to comment on such things and offer advice to the aspiring, when it came to politicized poetry, my advice was “don't”. Were I still in such a position, it still would be; in decades of reading poetry I've come across maybe one hundred poets who've managed to write a good politicized single poem. A handful of those have managed a full collection of politicized work. I have yet to come across a poet who has managed an entire career of good politicized poetry, though I have encountered two that have come a lot closer than anyone else. One is Carolyn Forche; the other is Natasha Trethewey.
Trethewey closes her newest book, published to coincide with the ceremony naming her the newest Poet Laureate of the United States, with a poem entitled “Illumination”, the final lines of which:
“...So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting”
Any writer is going to read those last few lines and have it resonate with him or her, but it packs an extra punch coming at the end of this book-length collection in which Trethewey frankly (and with a surprisingly unjaundiced eye) examines the fruits of what, in an earlier time, would have been called miscegination, both through ekphrastic poems examining seventeenth- and eighteenth century paintings and examining her relationship with her father. You can see where such a thing could go off the rails pretty easily, I trust, and yet Trethewey, much as she did in Native Guard, manages to tread a path through politicization that almost always remembers W. C. Williams' injunction to poets: “no ideas but in things.” You bring the images to the table, you lay them out, and you let the reader take away what he wants or needs to given his own baggage. I could choose lines at random to illustrate what I'm talking about, but one passage specifically struck me here as a sterling example of what I'm talking about, the final lines of the poem “Calling”, which describe a baptism (and how fraught with politicization is any religious topic?):
“...What comes back
is the sun's dazzle on a pool's surface,
light filtered through water
closing over my head, my mother—her body
between me and the high sun, a corona of light
around her face. Why not call it
a vision? What I know is this:
I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;
someone pulled me through
the water's bright ceiling
and I rose, initiate,
from one life into another.”
Image. Image. Image. Narrator commentary on image is, again, rooted in image, in concreteness (“What I know is this:...”). Value judgments are rendered through word choice rather than being spelled out; Trethewey never overplays her hand here. This is the essence of excellent poetry. **** ½
August 29, 2020
I’ve been reading loads of poetry this month and this collection stands out as exceptional. Many ekphrastic poems alongside family poems, all dealing with race, interracial families and identity. Very well done, beautifully written and felt and conveyed.
August 7, 2019
concentration is a lone gull
circling what's thrown back. Debris
weights the trawl like stones.
I bought this new from the House of Bezos; I thought the purchase an homage to the poet, that a slight residual might make its way to her coffer, a gratuity for the joy she gives me routinely. My copy arrived yesterday in the post with a significant dent and wrinkle, as if it had been bent nearly in half. It felt oblong and awkward. This discomfort vanished as I read it this morning, as a dash of summer rain whispered outside and Blind Lemon Jefferson played on the stereo. Thrall is a series of portraits of her father and an interrogation of certain pieces of art; maybe I'm confused and the interrogation at play is of her father.
Sunday before our trip to my parents I drove to Louisville to an independent bookstore to buy books for my folks. I also bought a stack of postcards to use as bookmarks. I remain enthralled by one of Heidegger, he appears holy in the photograph. It is a time of contradictions and mixed legacy. Poetry can help.
circling what's thrown back. Debris
weights the trawl like stones.
I bought this new from the House of Bezos; I thought the purchase an homage to the poet, that a slight residual might make its way to her coffer, a gratuity for the joy she gives me routinely. My copy arrived yesterday in the post with a significant dent and wrinkle, as if it had been bent nearly in half. It felt oblong and awkward. This discomfort vanished as I read it this morning, as a dash of summer rain whispered outside and Blind Lemon Jefferson played on the stereo. Thrall is a series of portraits of her father and an interrogation of certain pieces of art; maybe I'm confused and the interrogation at play is of her father.
Sunday before our trip to my parents I drove to Louisville to an independent bookstore to buy books for my folks. I also bought a stack of postcards to use as bookmarks. I remain enthralled by one of Heidegger, he appears holy in the photograph. It is a time of contradictions and mixed legacy. Poetry can help.
January 22, 2014
The music, the insight, the merging of history and family with such painful, illuminating rigor, and in such compelling images--I loved everything about this collection.
March 31, 2016
4.5 stars
October 15, 2020
3.5 Stars
April 14, 2021
natasha trethewey if you're reading this please write an essay about ekphrasis
May 13, 2015
This is the third collection of poems I've read by Natasha Trethewey who is the current United States Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize Winner and Poet Laureate of Mississippi. Thrall was a little slow going for me at the beginning unlike her prose and poetry work Beyond Katrina and the poetry collection Native Guard.
Thrall means "slave." The book's jacket is a reproduction of a casta painting. Casta is a word from the Iberian Peninsula and means "mixed race." Casta paintings were produced during the 18th century by artists in Mexico and were portraits of mixed race couples and their children. The casta painting on the cover is of a Native American (probably Aztec) woman, a European (Spanish) man, and their son and little daughter. Trethewey describes this family and others in casta paintings in the poem Taxonomy, 1. De Espanol y de India Produce Mestiso (The Spaniard and the Indian produce Mestizo).
I was a little disappointed by the poems on the casta paintings. They were a little dry, and I had hoped she would developed perhaps deeper fictitious tales about some of these lost to history people in the paintings. She does not. She mostly describes the paintings in quiet little poetic descriptions.
I liked the poems that come later in the book about her and her white father. In Native Guard she wrote in memory of her black mother who was murdered by her second husband. In Thrall she tries to come to terms with the white father who was for a time in her life, eventually going his own way and walking out of her and her mother's lives and remarrying. Like the Spanish men in the casta paintings, there would always remain a distance between her and her father like it did for those 18th century men and their mixed children. There was perhaps a degree of affection between them as it was with her and her father, but always a silent obstruction remained. I can tell by the poems that Trethewey's father tried to do his duty by her and her mother but the pressures of having a mixed marriage in a racist society tore them apart. History also served as an impediment. Years later Trethewey tries to understand the father who could not be as close to her as she wanted when she reunites with him.
The title poem Thrall is about the 17th century mixed race painter Juan de Pareja who was the slave of the classical Spanish artist Diego Velasquez. Pareja who never knew his white father became an artist in his own right. But he would always remain on the fringes of society even after Velasquez freed him, never being fully black or white.
In all of these poems there are barriers because of race. The people might mix in the secrecy of the bedroom but always it is understood that a wall must remain between them.
In Thrall Natasha Trethewey tries to come to terms with her personal history as a person of mixed race and also with the history of race in the Americans and Western Europe.
Thrall means "slave." The book's jacket is a reproduction of a casta painting. Casta is a word from the Iberian Peninsula and means "mixed race." Casta paintings were produced during the 18th century by artists in Mexico and were portraits of mixed race couples and their children. The casta painting on the cover is of a Native American (probably Aztec) woman, a European (Spanish) man, and their son and little daughter. Trethewey describes this family and others in casta paintings in the poem Taxonomy, 1. De Espanol y de India Produce Mestiso (The Spaniard and the Indian produce Mestizo).
I was a little disappointed by the poems on the casta paintings. They were a little dry, and I had hoped she would developed perhaps deeper fictitious tales about some of these lost to history people in the paintings. She does not. She mostly describes the paintings in quiet little poetic descriptions.
I liked the poems that come later in the book about her and her white father. In Native Guard she wrote in memory of her black mother who was murdered by her second husband. In Thrall she tries to come to terms with the white father who was for a time in her life, eventually going his own way and walking out of her and her mother's lives and remarrying. Like the Spanish men in the casta paintings, there would always remain a distance between her and her father like it did for those 18th century men and their mixed children. There was perhaps a degree of affection between them as it was with her and her father, but always a silent obstruction remained. I can tell by the poems that Trethewey's father tried to do his duty by her and her mother but the pressures of having a mixed marriage in a racist society tore them apart. History also served as an impediment. Years later Trethewey tries to understand the father who could not be as close to her as she wanted when she reunites with him.
The title poem Thrall is about the 17th century mixed race painter Juan de Pareja who was the slave of the classical Spanish artist Diego Velasquez. Pareja who never knew his white father became an artist in his own right. But he would always remain on the fringes of society even after Velasquez freed him, never being fully black or white.
In all of these poems there are barriers because of race. The people might mix in the secrecy of the bedroom but always it is understood that a wall must remain between them.
In Thrall Natasha Trethewey tries to come to terms with her personal history as a person of mixed race and also with the history of race in the Americans and Western Europe.
April 8, 2013
The opening poem, Elegy, for her father, is one of many powerful pieces in this collection.
How the Past Comes Back
Like a shadow across a stone,
gradually --
the name it darkens;
as one enters the world
through language --
like a child learning to speak
then naming
everything; as flower,
the neglected hydrangea
endlessly blossoming --
year after year
each bloom a blue refrain; as
the syllables of birdcall
coalescing in the trees,
repeating
a single word:
forgets;
as the dead bird's bright signature --
days after you buried it --
a single red feather
on the window glass
in the middle of your reflection.
Excerpts:
. . . The boy is a palimpsest of paint --
layers of color, history rendering him
that precise shade of in-between.
Taxonomy
What’s left is palimpsest—one memory
bleeding into another, overwriting it.
How else to explain
what remains?
Calling
All day, this dredging--beneath the tug
of waves: rhythm of what goes out,
comes back, comes back, comes back.
On Happiness
So much is left
untold Between
the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl
between what is said and not
white space framing the story
the way the past unwritten
eludes us So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting
Illumination
How the Past Comes Back
Like a shadow across a stone,
gradually --
the name it darkens;
as one enters the world
through language --
like a child learning to speak
then naming
everything; as flower,
the neglected hydrangea
endlessly blossoming --
year after year
each bloom a blue refrain; as
the syllables of birdcall
coalescing in the trees,
repeating
a single word:
forgets;
as the dead bird's bright signature --
days after you buried it --
a single red feather
on the window glass
in the middle of your reflection.
Excerpts:
. . . The boy is a palimpsest of paint --
layers of color, history rendering him
that precise shade of in-between.
Taxonomy
What’s left is palimpsest—one memory
bleeding into another, overwriting it.
How else to explain
what remains?
Calling
All day, this dredging--beneath the tug
of waves: rhythm of what goes out,
comes back, comes back, comes back.
On Happiness
So much is left
untold Between
the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl
between what is said and not
white space framing the story
the way the past unwritten
eludes us So much
is implication the afterimage
of measured syntax always there
ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
do not cross Even
as they rise up to meet us
the white page hovers beneath
silent incendiary waiting
Illumination
October 2, 2012
A radio interview I heard with the newest U.S. Poet Laureate caught my attention so I approached this slim book eagerly even though I am not a regular reader of poetry. In spite of my inexperience Natasha Trethewey’s poems often moved and in some cases captivated me. Many of the early poems in the book explore the historical contexts of Trethewey’s mixed race heritage by detailed and nuanced examinations of colonial era paintings with multi-race families, paintings that were designed to illustrate terms like mestizo, quadroon and mulatto. These paintings in themselves are fascinating. One is on the cover, but I assume it would be prohibitively expensive to include the rest in the book. They can be found through online searches and making that effort really enhances the reading.
The three poems that made me catch my breath and mark the pages so I can read them again and again are almost at the end of the book. Beautifully written and rich with layers of meaning, the poems Calling, Vespertina Cognito, and Illumination connect outer images, like water’s bright ceiling as seen from the bottom of a pool, pelicans gliding across the sky, and starred passages on a page of text, with internal experiences, like rebirth, dark thoughts crossing the mind, and the quest to uncover elusive meaning.
The three poems that made me catch my breath and mark the pages so I can read them again and again are almost at the end of the book. Beautifully written and rich with layers of meaning, the poems Calling, Vespertina Cognito, and Illumination connect outer images, like water’s bright ceiling as seen from the bottom of a pool, pelicans gliding across the sky, and starred passages on a page of text, with internal experiences, like rebirth, dark thoughts crossing the mind, and the quest to uncover elusive meaning.
July 26, 2016
Some poetry makes you think, other makes you feel. This collection is an interesting project but it was often a challenge to see how I should read the poem. I love that to get the best feeling of some pieces you need to see the work of art it's inspired by, but I can't say I always resonated with the poems. I'm not sure if it's just that I didn't connect on this first read or if it's something that will always hover just beyond my grasp. It's not so much that I didn't get what Natasha was writing about, it's just that most of the poems demanded in depth reading and possible re-reading. That some of these pieces are reactionary and capture what a single image inspired when coupled with the history behind the work of art was a fascinating concept. My main thing might be that I was looking for something light and instead got a collection that demands your attention. Some pieces were more gripping and immediate and I found myself preferring those due to their personal nature and the immediacy I was able to feel in the words on the page. All in all, a lovely collection I'll be rereading to see if by any chance there's something I missed on the first read... which does feel like the case.
August 24, 2015
Her poem "Enlightenment", about touring Thomas Jefferson's Monticello with her father, is priceless.
July 20, 2021
I picked up Thrall about 4 years ago amidst a very tumultuous trip to California which marked my first and only trip to the US. Revisiting the book now, I wish I had been able to appreciate Thrall earlier in my life. It is a staggering achievement, I think, to blend the personal and political in poetry without one outweighing the other. Trethewey's collection, however, combines poems of familial memory with an examination of fine art, and together recenter the black body and demonstrate how beauty, as an aesthetic value, can be used to reproduce taxonomies of knowledge and power.
Picking out a few poems for comment does not convey the value of the collection's sequencing, which helps present artwork and memory side by side as commentary on the other. There is the dignity of the "Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmanus" ("Listening, she leans / into what she knows. Light falls over half her face.") which is then followed by a poem, "Knowledge" where the black body is dissected and on display ("Whoever she was, she comes to us like this: / lips parted, long hair spilling from the table... nipples on display"). The latter half of the collection, which delves into Trethewey's conflicted relationship with her father, Eric Trethewey (also a poet), is informed by the conversations about race and power, the inheritance she has to grapple with in terms of poetic legacy.
When I first opened this collection, I lived with the poem "Elegy (for my father)" as a lodestone. Now, as I finally read it again, I am drawn to another one of Trethewey's father poems:
Fouled
The shifting weights of light and dark, of father and daughter, are haunting. A book meant for the museums. 5 stars.
Picking out a few poems for comment does not convey the value of the collection's sequencing, which helps present artwork and memory side by side as commentary on the other. There is the dignity of the "Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmanus" ("Listening, she leans / into what she knows. Light falls over half her face.") which is then followed by a poem, "Knowledge" where the black body is dissected and on display ("Whoever she was, she comes to us like this: / lips parted, long hair spilling from the table... nipples on display"). The latter half of the collection, which delves into Trethewey's conflicted relationship with her father, Eric Trethewey (also a poet), is informed by the conversations about race and power, the inheritance she has to grapple with in terms of poetic legacy.
When I first opened this collection, I lived with the poem "Elegy (for my father)" as a lodestone. Now, as I finally read it again, I am drawn to another one of Trethewey's father poems:
Fouled
From the next room I hear my father's voice,
a groan at first, a sound so sad I think he must be
reliving a catalog of things lost: all the dead
come back to stand ringside, the glorious body
of his youth - a light heavyweight, fight-ready
and glistening - that beauty I see now in pictures.
Looking into the room, I half imagine I'll find him
shadowboxing the dark, arms and legs twitching
as a dog runs in sleep. Tonight, I've had to help him
into bed - stumbling up the stairs, his arm a weight
on my shoulders so heavy it nearly brought us down.
Now his distress cracks open the night; he is calling
my name. I could wake him, tell him it's only a dream,
that I am here. Here is the threshold I do not cross:
a sliver of light through a doorway finds his tattoo,
the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.
The shifting weights of light and dark, of father and daughter, are haunting. A book meant for the museums. 5 stars.
December 3, 2020
A really gorgeous selection of poems, mostly ekphrastic. I wish that the book included the images that were referenced, but also part of the mystique is in their absence. And absence is a core theme of the book, which elevates the text.
February 16, 2019
Trethewey's poetry is so powerful.
July 24, 2012
Natasha Trethewey, the Timeless Poet
2007 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey gifts us with this rather extraordinary collection of poems that explore relationships between parent and child in a marriage of two people from different cultures: Trethewey is the mixed race progeny of a white father (a poet) and a darker skinned Mexican mother. This platform provides a complex stage setting for discussions of heritage, depth of cultural bonds and influences, and a particularly fine examination of differences between peoples from different vantages. And she manages to do all of this with elegant writings about art - especially colonial Mexican art - and other aspects that bring us to a closer understanding of others.
Though her poems benefit from the gentle manner in which she places her words on a page, such placement is restricted by the format of a reviewer's note. But the only way to truly appreciate just how wondrous is the poetry of Natasha Trethewey is to quote some of her work:
Torna atrás
The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so
we see him at this work: painting a portrait of his wife -
their dark child watching nearby, a servant grinding colors
in the corner. The woman poses just beyond his canvas
and cannot see her likeness, her less than mirror image
coming to life beneath his hand. He has rendered her
homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene, dressed
in late-century fashion, a `chicqueador' - mark of beauty
in the shape of a crescent moon - affixed to her temple.
If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has yet to make her
beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,
the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress
with lace and trim, it is only one way to see it. You might see,
instead, that the artist - perhaps to show his own skill -
has made the father a dilettante, incapable of capturing
his wife's beauty. Or, that he cannot see it: his mind's eye
reducing her to what he's made as if to reveal the illusion
immanent in her flesh. If you consider the century's mythology
of the body - that a dark spot marked the genitals of anyone
with African blood - you might see how the black moon
on her white face recalls it: the `roseta' she passes to her child
marking him `torna atrás'. If I tell you such terms were born
in the Enlightenment's hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire
is myopia, you might see the father's vision as desire embodied
in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself
as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift
ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand
my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is
that a man could love - and so diminish what he loves.
And as operatically magnificent is her writing that we forget she can be brief and in the moment as in the following poem:
Fouled
From the next room I hear my father's voice,
a groan at first, a sound so sad I think he must be
reliving a catalog of things lost: all the dead
come back to stand ringside, the glorious body
of his youth - a light heavyweight, fight ready
and glistening - that beauty I see now in pictures.
Looking into the room, I half imagine I'll find him
shadowboxing the dark, arms and legs twitching
as a dog runs in sleep. Tonight, I've had to help him
into bed - stumbling up the stairs, his arm a weight
on my shoulders so heavy it nearly brought us down.
now his distress cracks open the night; he is calling
my name. I could wake him, tell him it's only a dream,
that I am here. Here is the threshold I do not cross:
a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo,
the anchor on his forearm, tangled in its chain.
Natasha Trethewey is wise, talented and sensitive and is capable of producing massive room filling paintings of poems as easily and with as much facility as she is with brief thoughts such as this last poem. She is probably one of today's most important poets.
Grady Harp
2007 Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey gifts us with this rather extraordinary collection of poems that explore relationships between parent and child in a marriage of two people from different cultures: Trethewey is the mixed race progeny of a white father (a poet) and a darker skinned Mexican mother. This platform provides a complex stage setting for discussions of heritage, depth of cultural bonds and influences, and a particularly fine examination of differences between peoples from different vantages. And she manages to do all of this with elegant writings about art - especially colonial Mexican art - and other aspects that bring us to a closer understanding of others.
Though her poems benefit from the gentle manner in which she places her words on a page, such placement is restricted by the format of a reviewer's note. But the only way to truly appreciate just how wondrous is the poetry of Natasha Trethewey is to quote some of her work:
Torna atrás
The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so
we see him at this work: painting a portrait of his wife -
their dark child watching nearby, a servant grinding colors
in the corner. The woman poses just beyond his canvas
and cannot see her likeness, her less than mirror image
coming to life beneath his hand. He has rendered her
homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene, dressed
in late-century fashion, a `chicqueador' - mark of beauty
in the shape of a crescent moon - affixed to her temple.
If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has yet to make her
beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,
the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress
with lace and trim, it is only one way to see it. You might see,
instead, that the artist - perhaps to show his own skill -
has made the father a dilettante, incapable of capturing
his wife's beauty. Or, that he cannot see it: his mind's eye
reducing her to what he's made as if to reveal the illusion
immanent in her flesh. If you consider the century's mythology
of the body - that a dark spot marked the genitals of anyone
with African blood - you might see how the black moon
on her white face recalls it: the `roseta' she passes to her child
marking him `torna atrás'. If I tell you such terms were born
in the Enlightenment's hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire
is myopia, you might see the father's vision as desire embodied
in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself
as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift
ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand
my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is
that a man could love - and so diminish what he loves.
And as operatically magnificent is her writing that we forget she can be brief and in the moment as in the following poem:
Fouled
From the next room I hear my father's voice,
a groan at first, a sound so sad I think he must be
reliving a catalog of things lost: all the dead
come back to stand ringside, the glorious body
of his youth - a light heavyweight, fight ready
and glistening - that beauty I see now in pictures.
Looking into the room, I half imagine I'll find him
shadowboxing the dark, arms and legs twitching
as a dog runs in sleep. Tonight, I've had to help him
into bed - stumbling up the stairs, his arm a weight
on my shoulders so heavy it nearly brought us down.
now his distress cracks open the night; he is calling
my name. I could wake him, tell him it's only a dream,
that I am here. Here is the threshold I do not cross:
a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo,
the anchor on his forearm, tangled in its chain.
Natasha Trethewey is wise, talented and sensitive and is capable of producing massive room filling paintings of poems as easily and with as much facility as she is with brief thoughts such as this last poem. She is probably one of today's most important poets.
Grady Harp
November 12, 2012
Thrall is stunning; the poems themselves, the theme and collection, the voice, the ekphrasis, the personal – everything just works with Trethewey’s latest book. In contrast to Domestic Work’s rigidness and telling-style, Thrall is alive within its ekphrastic constraint; even Native Guard, which I felt was fantastic, does not quite stand up to the completeness I feel when reading this collection. As a reader, I feel included and intimate with the speaker (something that was missing from DM), as well as emotionally charged and touched. Great poesis, this.
“Elegy” begins the collection by offering a taste of the motifs to come. While Trethewey varies her form enough to keep the poems moving, she also uses the couplet to great effect; the continuing couplets (and later, tercets) bring both a meditative quality to her poetry, and a harder hitting emotional punch. The images of a river, flowing memory and the uses of knowledge, and “my back to where I know we are headed” all seem to find their way in each of her pieces as well (5). Much of the collection, appropriately, deals with slavery (not only of the body, but of the mind) and how those of perceived minority are thralls not only to other people, but to their “classifications.” While obvious even in the subtitles of “Taxonomy,” the brilliance (and delicacy) of Trethewey’s handling and understanding of this material is well showcased in “Knowledge”; the cold, calculating, scientific distance of men is handled so deftly that I, as a reader, can still feel Trethewey’s indictment of those men just as much as I can feel their methodological excitement. That takes practice.
Of course, Trethewey’s own personal history is what really gives this collection a home. “Enlightenment,” “Rotation,” “Bird in the House,” and “Artifact” all offer glimpses of a home life that is ensnared in power relations – historical, societal, and definitely familial. The ending lines from “Artifact” – “and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic / sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret” – symbolize the struggle these pieces seek to explore: the conflict between our future and the ideas and objects of our past which contain, constrain, and enthrall us (53). “On Happiness” and “Vespertina Cognitio” to me, are the real endings to Trethewey’s journey; while “Illumination” conceptualizes an end, it’s the “guarantee” that the “rhythm of what goes out / comes back, comes back, comes back” that is Trethewey’s epiphany – whether for better or worse (74-5).
“Elegy” begins the collection by offering a taste of the motifs to come. While Trethewey varies her form enough to keep the poems moving, she also uses the couplet to great effect; the continuing couplets (and later, tercets) bring both a meditative quality to her poetry, and a harder hitting emotional punch. The images of a river, flowing memory and the uses of knowledge, and “my back to where I know we are headed” all seem to find their way in each of her pieces as well (5). Much of the collection, appropriately, deals with slavery (not only of the body, but of the mind) and how those of perceived minority are thralls not only to other people, but to their “classifications.” While obvious even in the subtitles of “Taxonomy,” the brilliance (and delicacy) of Trethewey’s handling and understanding of this material is well showcased in “Knowledge”; the cold, calculating, scientific distance of men is handled so deftly that I, as a reader, can still feel Trethewey’s indictment of those men just as much as I can feel their methodological excitement. That takes practice.
Of course, Trethewey’s own personal history is what really gives this collection a home. “Enlightenment,” “Rotation,” “Bird in the House,” and “Artifact” all offer glimpses of a home life that is ensnared in power relations – historical, societal, and definitely familial. The ending lines from “Artifact” – “and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic / sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret” – symbolize the struggle these pieces seek to explore: the conflict between our future and the ideas and objects of our past which contain, constrain, and enthrall us (53). “On Happiness” and “Vespertina Cognitio” to me, are the real endings to Trethewey’s journey; while “Illumination” conceptualizes an end, it’s the “guarantee” that the “rhythm of what goes out / comes back, comes back, comes back” that is Trethewey’s epiphany – whether for better or worse (74-5).
January 18, 2013
"Thrall" is marked by luxurious language, intensity of intellect, and troubling insight. It is a disturbingly gorgeous collection of poems that assaults cliches on race, family, history, personhood. The language is so sparse, it's like a stallion: sleek and muscular and instantly admirable. Some examples:
"mist at the banks like a net / settling around us"
"the boy's mother contorts, watchful / her neck twisting on its spine, red beads / yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood / her face so black she nearly disappears"
"...the boy is a palimpsest of paint--layers of color, history rendering him / that precise shade of in-between"
"and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic / sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret."
(There are so many more.)
This collection of poems is complex, deep, rich, rewarding, lyrical. It is full of mourning, full of exultation. As a poet, there are few books that have engaged me so foundationally. Maybe I'm biased. I'm of mixed race ancestry like Trethewey. I grapple with the taxonomies and stereotypes of racial mixes and meaning, no matter where I find myself.
But this is not just a book for people who yearn for some kind of ethnic acceptance or continuity. Otherwise this volume would be nearer to propaganda, or political science writing. Instead, Trethewey speaks about inner divides, cultural ambivalence, our universal estrangements. She never sounds preachy, yet there is a sense of the prophet: one who speaks. One who dares to speak what is hidden, shameful, unrecognized. One who calls glory down on the world, broken as it is.
The power in this collection derives in part from her stellar poetic craft, but her technique and mastery of language are just one component of my admiration. I couldn't say Trethewey is America's greatest poet, or the finest in diction and magic, nor is she equal to the eternal greats. Still she has crafted a sublime edifice of beautiful poetic steel, welded by the hot glowing spark of brutal honesty.
"Thrall" is full of poems that speak about not just Trethewey's own mixed heritage, but on the co-mingled nature of pain, desire, relationships, past. Everywhere in this world, there is mixture. There is division. There are inner/outer schemes. We are disappointed, disapproved of, denied.
As delicate as some of these subjects are, this collection is not timid. By deft handling of flaw and family, sin and sweetness, "Thrall" gives me courage to write from the authentic, difficult history of my own experience, without varnish or arrogance. Thank you, Trethewey, for beautiful, brave poems that move beyond pain to a place of some measure of redemption.
"mist at the banks like a net / settling around us"
"the boy's mother contorts, watchful / her neck twisting on its spine, red beads / yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood / her face so black she nearly disappears"
"...the boy is a palimpsest of paint--layers of color, history rendering him / that precise shade of in-between"
"and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic / sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret."
(There are so many more.)
This collection of poems is complex, deep, rich, rewarding, lyrical. It is full of mourning, full of exultation. As a poet, there are few books that have engaged me so foundationally. Maybe I'm biased. I'm of mixed race ancestry like Trethewey. I grapple with the taxonomies and stereotypes of racial mixes and meaning, no matter where I find myself.
But this is not just a book for people who yearn for some kind of ethnic acceptance or continuity. Otherwise this volume would be nearer to propaganda, or political science writing. Instead, Trethewey speaks about inner divides, cultural ambivalence, our universal estrangements. She never sounds preachy, yet there is a sense of the prophet: one who speaks. One who dares to speak what is hidden, shameful, unrecognized. One who calls glory down on the world, broken as it is.
The power in this collection derives in part from her stellar poetic craft, but her technique and mastery of language are just one component of my admiration. I couldn't say Trethewey is America's greatest poet, or the finest in diction and magic, nor is she equal to the eternal greats. Still she has crafted a sublime edifice of beautiful poetic steel, welded by the hot glowing spark of brutal honesty.
"Thrall" is full of poems that speak about not just Trethewey's own mixed heritage, but on the co-mingled nature of pain, desire, relationships, past. Everywhere in this world, there is mixture. There is division. There are inner/outer schemes. We are disappointed, disapproved of, denied.
As delicate as some of these subjects are, this collection is not timid. By deft handling of flaw and family, sin and sweetness, "Thrall" gives me courage to write from the authentic, difficult history of my own experience, without varnish or arrogance. Thank you, Trethewey, for beautiful, brave poems that move beyond pain to a place of some measure of redemption.
July 13, 2013
AMAZING!! Trethewey covers, with almost academic skill and depth, the depth and mazes not only of race in the Americas ( some of her most brilliant poems are set in Spanish colonies, addressing the Spanish "system" of classifying race and mixed race) but of personal emotional narratives as well. She also pulls from art history brilliantly throughout the collection, at one point describing the painting on the book's cover in a poem addressing the 'mestizo/a', the now-outdated term a mixed child born to a Caucasian (Spaniard) father and a mother of colour. (She also addresses the 'mulatto/a".)
Not only are her poems---in their half-stark, half -substantive and meaningful diction--- truly remarkable on their own; but the fact that her words address race and colour and history in such a perfect, deep, spot-on, and meaningful way, make them simply superb. In both subject and substance ( and especially in her brilliant, fluid marriage of the two), these poems are a masterpiece.
How this poet must have studied! Everything! Not only is she a writer, she delves into Art History authoritatively and uses it in her poems ( from the stance of one half-turned figure to the description of the way the mixed child turns in his mother's arms to the look and smile on the mother!s face) Trethewey not so much *uses* as weaves her clear understanding of art analysis to make her poems true masterpieces.
The fact that a poet (like Trethewey herself) is mixed obviously doesn't always mean that s/he innately understands every aspect of colourism. But Trethewey has dedicated her life to the intellectual and social study of almost everything, especially the social and political implications of race. She uses not only her personal experiences and emotions but also this formidable intellect to create one of the greatest collections on race, history, and personal narrative of the century. (No joke).
Everyone needs to read this collection and its nuances of race, culture, and colour.
Trethewey also writes about her own emotions; not to be missed is "Elegy", about a fishing trip with her father and in which she reflects on being his daughter and being a poet, and the sometimes uncomfortable intersection of the two.
This is possibly one of the best and substantive book of poems I have ever read. Trethewey not only needs to stay US Poet Laureate; she needs to win a Nobel.
Simply stunning.
Not only are her poems---in their half-stark, half -substantive and meaningful diction--- truly remarkable on their own; but the fact that her words address race and colour and history in such a perfect, deep, spot-on, and meaningful way, make them simply superb. In both subject and substance ( and especially in her brilliant, fluid marriage of the two), these poems are a masterpiece.
How this poet must have studied! Everything! Not only is she a writer, she delves into Art History authoritatively and uses it in her poems ( from the stance of one half-turned figure to the description of the way the mixed child turns in his mother's arms to the look and smile on the mother!s face) Trethewey not so much *uses* as weaves her clear understanding of art analysis to make her poems true masterpieces.
The fact that a poet (like Trethewey herself) is mixed obviously doesn't always mean that s/he innately understands every aspect of colourism. But Trethewey has dedicated her life to the intellectual and social study of almost everything, especially the social and political implications of race. She uses not only her personal experiences and emotions but also this formidable intellect to create one of the greatest collections on race, history, and personal narrative of the century. (No joke).
Everyone needs to read this collection and its nuances of race, culture, and colour.
Trethewey also writes about her own emotions; not to be missed is "Elegy", about a fishing trip with her father and in which she reflects on being his daughter and being a poet, and the sometimes uncomfortable intersection of the two.
This is possibly one of the best and substantive book of poems I have ever read. Trethewey not only needs to stay US Poet Laureate; she needs to win a Nobel.
Simply stunning.
February 21, 2020
[rating = A+]
One of my: Best Books of the Year (for 2019)
Wow. I was "enthralled" with this poetry collection. The blending of personal and historical narratives was amazing. Her personal life, being a daughter of bi-racial parents, works so well with the struggle for identity and voice for Mulattos or other racial "inbetweeners". She writes so effortlessly (or so it seems) about how her mother was mistaken for her maid and how her dad seemed to (sorta?) treat her like something to be studied or "to be made better". Really interesting contemplations and easy to read but fun to absorb and process through the tensions of reality vs the mythological/fables. I really thought Natasha Trethewey had much to say and in such a delicate, powerful, but also shy, way; brilliant in its scope and near perfect in its dissection and discussion. This is a book everyone should read (though it is not as specific on some of her personal pains, this is quite alright for she has no onus to give us herself to dissect). Instead we interrogate and read her work with the knowledge of her personal history but mainly of the continued history of the struggle for this "in-between" to find a voice and a place for themselves.
One of my: Best Books of the Year (for 2019)
Wow. I was "enthralled" with this poetry collection. The blending of personal and historical narratives was amazing. Her personal life, being a daughter of bi-racial parents, works so well with the struggle for identity and voice for Mulattos or other racial "inbetweeners". She writes so effortlessly (or so it seems) about how her mother was mistaken for her maid and how her dad seemed to (sorta?) treat her like something to be studied or "to be made better". Really interesting contemplations and easy to read but fun to absorb and process through the tensions of reality vs the mythological/fables. I really thought Natasha Trethewey had much to say and in such a delicate, powerful, but also shy, way; brilliant in its scope and near perfect in its dissection and discussion. This is a book everyone should read (though it is not as specific on some of her personal pains, this is quite alright for she has no onus to give us herself to dissect). Instead we interrogate and read her work with the knowledge of her personal history but mainly of the continued history of the struggle for this "in-between" to find a voice and a place for themselves.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 224 reviews