Natasha Tretheway has a sense of history. Her poetry collections explore the way language is used to explain and obscure the complicated relationship we have to the past. And, at a time when language has been so badly debased, this willingness to examine its failings is needed more than ever.
Tretheway, appointed national poet laureate yesterday, is 46 and of mixed race — a fact that is central to her writing.
In a story in The New York Times, Charles McGrath wrote that Trethewey’s “great theme is memory, and in particular the way private recollection and public history sometimes intersect but more often diverge.”
As one of her poems explains, Ms. Trethewey is the product of a union that was still a crime in Mississippi when her parents married: her mother was black and her father was white. Years later, after her mother’s death, she came across her own birth certificate and saw that the line for the race of her mother says, “colored,” the race of her father, “Canadian.”
“That’s how language works — how we change and rewrite ourselves,” she said.
I can’t think of a better definition for the poetic mission than that.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 