Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Pearl McHaney’s essay focuses on twice US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, an example of the biracial national identity of the South and the US, whose work reflects her attempts to cope with the complicated legacy of race and reach self-reconciliation. Pearl McHaney analyses Trethewey’s poetry and prose, which has a markedly autobiographical quality, finding countless samples of how she interweaves her personal story with regional and national history in her work. McHaney argues that traces of Trethewey’s life experience are discernible in much of her poetry and distinguishes different stages in the poet’s literary output. The poems in Domestic Work reflect the poet’s early attempts “to not focus on her mother’s murder” by writing poems about her grandmother. McHaney states that in her second collection of poems, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Trethewey adopts a “thicker mask,” but even so it reveals “the poet’s life still.” According to McHaney, it is in Trethewey’s third book, Native Guard, that her “voice sounds loudest in telling her life story.” In the first section of the book, Trethewey remembers her mother and recreates her grief over her mother’s death; in the second section, she “brings to light the erased histories of the South”; and in the final third section, she weaves “the personal and national life stories together.” Trethewey’s complicated relationship with her father—already manifested in some of her earlier pieces—is the source of inspiration for many of the poems in Thrall. Finally, McHaney analyzes Beyond Katrina, a blending of her poems and the poetry by her half-brother written from prison after the Katrina disaster. Trethewey’s work reflects her constant effort to deal with “her complicated legacies,” which include an estranged white poet-father and a dead black mother who can only be a muse.