A few weeks ago I finished Native Guard--worth every bit of her Pulitzer Prize and then some. Read it, then talk to me about it. (I loved the entire book. Of special note are "Myth" which is written in two sections--the second the reverse of the first--and "Native Guard" the title poem written as journal entries from a Native Guard soldier [a palimpset] and the last line of each section becomes the first of the next). I read some of Tretheway's work to Wesley and to my class. Everyone could use more poetry in their lives, and more people with whom to discuss poetry.
Each poem expanded on those around it; the collection, then, wasn't just compiled work but an argument, a cause. Unabashedly she addresses tradition, theory, history, arrangement memory. Using "Theories of Time and Space" as the prologue, each poem feels like a progression. I don't know how she does it. I need to learn.
As I work on my own collection of work, I worry that it will be a bound version of a worked-over compost pile. Who cares what wholeness is there if together it does not amount to anything? I use a quote from Charles Lamb to direct me in my discussion of "belonging," but is that what I am actually writing about? Or do I write the same piece in different shapes? (They may overlap at times, but this is one concern I must desert for my sanity.) I need to decide on a stronger guiding theory to guide this collection--and every other collection that follows.
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