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Posted by: David Bunch

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, and as always I like to bring you the winner in the poetry category.

The 2007 prize for poetry went to Natasha Trethewey for "Native Guard". It was interesting to me to note that she is from Gulfport, MS, a town not so far away from Baton Rouge and one that was affected greatly by Hurricane Katrina.

Growing up in the Deep South, Natasha Trethewey was never told that in her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards — one of the Union's first official black units. Trethewey's new book of poems pays homage to the soldiers who served and whose voices have echoed through her own life.

The title poem imagines the life of a former slave stationed at the fort, who is charged with writing letters home for the illiterate or invalid POWs and his fellow soldiers. Just as he becomes the guard of Ship Island's memory, so Trethewey recalls her own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man. Her parents' marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through elegiac poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South. Native Guard is haunted by the intersection of national and personal experience.

(The above taken from the already referenced Pulitzer website which credits the book's jacket for the information).

Here is a poem by Natasha Trethewey.