Thrall
Poems
Natasha Trethewey
- 96 pages
- English
- ePUB (adapté aux mobiles)
- Disponible sur iOS et Android
Thrall
Poems
Natasha Trethewey
Ă propos de ce livre
The stunning follow-up volume to Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prizeâwinning Native Guard, by the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States. Natasha Trethewey's poems are at once deeply personal and historicalâexploring her own interracial and complicated rootsâand 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.
Foire aux questions
Informations
Elegy
For my father
I think by now the river must be thick
    with salmon. Late August, I imagine it
as it was that morning: drizzle needling
    the surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around usâeverything damp
    and shining. That morning, awkward
and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
    into the current and found our placesâ
you upstream a few yards and out
    far deeper. You must remember how
the river seeped in over your boots
    and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you, how
    first you mimed our guideâs casting
then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky
    between us; and later, rod in hand, how
you triedâagain and againâto find
    that perfect arc, flight of an insect
skimming the riverâs surface. Perhaps
    you recall I cast my line and reeled in
two small trout we could not keep.
    Because I had to release them, I confess,
I thought about the pastâworking
    the hooks loose, the fish writhing
in my hands, each one slipping away
    before I could let go. I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
    for an elegy Iâd writeâone dayâ
when the time came. Your daughter,
    I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting
    your line, and when it did not come back
empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,
    dreaming, I step again into the small boat
that carried us out and watch the bank recedingâ
    my back to where I know we are headed.
Miracle of the Black Leg
Pictorial representations of the physician-saints Cosmas and Damian and the myth of the miracle transplantâblack donor, white recipientâdate back to the mid-fourteenth century, appearing much later than written versions of the story.
1.
Always, the dark body hewn asunder; always
one man is healed, his sick limb replaced,
placed in the other manâs grave: the white leg
buried beside the corpse or attached as if
it were always there. If not for the dark appendage
you might miss the story beneath this storyâ
what remains each time the myth changes: how,
in one version, the doctors harvest the leg
from a man, four days dead, in his tomb at the church
of a martyr, orâin anotherâdesecrate a body
fresh in the graveyard at Saint Peter in Chains:
there was buried just today an Ethiopian.
Even now, it stays with us: when we mean to uncover
the truth, we dig, say unearth.
2.
Emblematic in paint, a signifier of the bodyâs lacuna,
the black leg is at once a grafted narrative,
a redacted line of text, and in this scene a dark stocking
pulled above the knee. Here the patient is sleeping,
his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if
heâll wake from a dream. On the floor
beside the bed, a dead Moorâhands crossed at the groin,
the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.
And in the ...
Table des matiĂšres
- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Part I
- Elegy
- Part II
- Miracle of the Black Leg
- On Captivity
- Taxonomy
- Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus; or, The Mulata
- Knowledge
- Part III
- The Americans
- Mano Prieta
- De Español y Negra; Mulata
- Mythology
- Geography
- Torna AtrĂĄs
- Bird in the House
- Artifact
- Fouled
- Rotation
- Part IV
- Thrall
- Calling
- Enlightenment
- How the Past Comes Back
- On Happiness
- Vespertina Cognitio
- Illumination
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Read More from Natasha Trethewey
- About the Author
- Connect with HMH