Native Guard: Poems

Native Guard won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Natasha Trethewey, later a two-term United States Poet Laureate, weaves her own family story into the wider history of the American South, moving between personal memory and the public record of the Mississippi Gulf Coast where she grew up.

At its centre is a sonnet sequence in the voice of a Black soldier of the Louisiana Native Guards, a Union regiment stationed on Ship Island during the Civil War. Written in elegies, ghazals, sonnets and free verse, the collection is a rich text for literature students and anyone interested in how poetry recovers voices that history has left out.