God's chatter.(Verse chronicle)(Native Guard)(Man and Camel)(Ommateum, with Doxology)(Firstborn)(God's Silence)(Horse Latitudes)(Book review)

Natasha Trethewey's well-mannered, well-meaning poems are as confused about race as the rest of us. The daughter of a black mother and white father, she was raised in the deep South of the Sixties, when the civil rights acts had still not penetrated the backwaters of her state. (Some would say that in large swatches of the South they haven't penetrated yet.) Under the miscegenation laws, her parents' marriage was illegal. In Native Guard, she has wrapped a memoir of her childhood around Civil War history--near her hometown, miles off the coast, former slaves and free men-of-color mustered into the Union army stood guard over Confederate vows at a ramshackle island fort. (1) A soldier notes in his diary:

 
   Truth be told, I do not want to forget 
   anything of my former life: the landscape's 
   song of bondage--dirge in the river's throat 
   where it churns into the Gulf, wind in trees 
   choked with vines. 

Soldiers don't write this way, but poets do. The landscape's song of bondage, the dirge in the river's throat--this ex-slave's fancy phrasemaking troubles that "Truth be told" because every scrap of art here makes the past a lie. There were literate slaves, all too few, and perhaps none among the lowly soldiers serving at the sandy, fly-ridden prison near Fort Massachusetts. (The major of the regiment, however, a slave-owning Creole, spoke five languages and was the highest-ranking black officer in the Union army.) To recreate a voice rendered mute by history, Trethewey has sometimes borrowed from a white colonel's memoir to make do. Putting the words of an educated white into the mouth of a freed slave isn't so bad; but, when Trethewey is forced to choose between the pretty and the profane, the pretty wins every time. She's an aesthete in wolf's clothing.

Trethewey's last book, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), was a portrait of a prostitute in Storyville, the red-light district of turn-of-the-century New Orleans where E. J. Bellocq took his haunting glass-plates of local whores, who looked at times surprisingly genteel. The poems invent a past re-imagined through the wishful thinking of the present, in that theme park of the oppressed designed by modern academics. Forty-five years ago, an amateur historian who took the trouble to record Storyville's surviving denizens and habitues found many prostitutes still alive--a couple of the transcripts are as brilliantly foul-mouthed as any episode of Deadwood. It's a long way from there to Trethewey's prim, rose-colored-glasses whore who, however borne down, seems sad in the pluckiest possible way.

As soon as you know the premises of Trethewey's poems, you know everything: they're the architecture of their own prejudices. Though fond of form, she fudges any restrictions that prove inconvenient, so we get faux villanelles, quasi-sonnets, and lots of lines half-ripened into pentameter--most poems end up in professional but uninspired free verse. Trethewey wears the past like a diamond brooch. She writes of her parents with no fury or sympathy or even regret, just the blank courtesy of a barista at Starbucks. You read the tales of prostitution and slavery without feeling a thing--the slaves might just as well be dressed by Edith Head, with a score by Max Steiner swelling gloriously over a Technicolor sunset. Trethewey's moral sunniness has all the conviction of Scarlett O'Hara gushing, "As Gawd is mah witness, I'll nevah be hungry agai-yun."

Since the poems know where they're going long before they get there, it's a shock when one takes a wrong turn. As a girl, bringing daffodils to her mother, Trethewey sees in them something of herself ("each blossom a head lifted up//toward praise"):

 
      I knew nothing 
   of Narcissus or the daffodils' short spring-- 
 
   how they'd dry like graveside flowers, rustling 
   when the wind blew--a whisper, treacherous, 
   from the sill. Be taken with yourself, 
 
   they said to me; Die early, to my mother.