Gradesaver has published ClassicNotes on many of Trethewey's most notable poems, including "Native Guard," "Incident," "Myth," and "Enlightenment."
Trethewey's work often focuses on the role of race in American history. She writes about it in a wide range of contexts using a variety of forms, always carefully choosing a structure that suits her subject. In some of her earliest work, she inhabits the voices of specific characters, seeking to express the most immediate details of their lives. In "Housekeeping," a poem from her first collection, Domestic Work, Trethewey describes how a group of women preserve various household objects, seeking to extend their usefulness and avoid waste: "We mourn the broken things, chair legs / wrenched from their seats, chipped plates, / the threadbare clothes. We work the magic / of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes. / We save what we can, melt small pieces / of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones / for soup." Cataloging everything from chair parts to torn clothing, the speaker of the poem focus in on small details, demonstrating the level of care they put into these efforts. Trethewey uses the plural pronoun "we" to show that this work is part of a collective experience. While the form of the poem is not unusual, Trethewey's small stylistic choices frame its central subject: the minor frustrations and triumphs of daily life.
In her 2002 collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, Trethewey goes further back in time, writing about prostitutes working in New Orleans' red-light district at the turn of the 19th century. Examining the photography of E.J. Bellocq, Trethewey portrays his process as a strange and invasive one: "Later, I took arsenic—tablets I swallowed / to keep me fair, bleached white as stone. / Whiter still, I am a reversed silhouette / against the black backdrop where I pose, now, / for the photographs, a man named Bellocq. / He visits often, buys time only to look / through his lens. It seems I can sit for hours, / suffer the distant eye he trains on me." The speaker, a biracial woman, demonstrates a concern with keeping herself "fair," and ingests dangerous arsenic tablets to do so. Bellocq is shown as a frequent guest of the house where the speaker works, but he is only interested in looking "through his lens," placing a "distant eye" on the speaker as she poses. While this seems like a straightforward story, Trethewey's depiction reveals the hidden layers of the photograph. While Bellocq is only interested in photographing her, he still engages in an act of objectification. By focusing on the paleness of her complexion, and making her "sit for hours," he is making demands on her body. In this regard, he is not so different from the speaker's other customers. Trethewey shows the reader that Bellocq's photography still enacts ownership over the speaker, as it seeks to make her appear white, not unlike the society she lives in. Here, and elsewhere in her poetry, Trethewey's selection of details and studied historical accuracy work in the service of capturing the social pressures of specific places and times.
Commonly regarded as her most important work, Native Guard (2006) highlights Trethewey's abilities as a stylist, as she moves comfortably between contemporary free verse and older forms like the villanelle. This is perhaps most evident in the title poem, which is a sequence of sonnets from the perspective of a member of the Louisiana Native Guard that follows the structure of dated journal entries. While the individual sonnets work as effective episodes within the soldier's overarching narrative, it is the connection between them that allows Trethewey to revisit themes across sections. The final two lines of each sonnet are echoed, with variation, in the opening of the next sonnet, allowing her to explore themes through a progression of scenes. For example, the section titled "April 1863" ends with a colonel speaking dismissively of battlefield casualties: "The Colonel said: / an unfortunate incident; said: / their names shall deck the page of history." The following section, "June 1863," recycles these lines, but with an even grimmer tone: "Some names shall deck the page of history / as it is written on stone. Some will not." In this second example, Trethewey goes on to describe how a Union general left the bodies of Black Union soldiers to rot on a battlefield. She uses the refrain of "their names shall deck the page of history" and adds "some will not," to both emphasize the hollow promise of the colonel and show that the sacrifice of these soldiers will not be recorded or passed on. This is one of many instances in which Trethewey effectively utilizes accumulation and repetition. By varying lines slightly, she is able to show the speaker's changing point of view and gradual disillusionment with the Union Army. This use of repetition and variation became increasingly prominent in her subsequent works.
In Thrall, her fourth collection, Trethewey primarily writes about portraits from the 18th century, while simultaneously dealing with the stories of mixed-race families of the time period. Throughout the book, she uses the language of art and painting to underscore her thematic material. In the poem "Enlightenment," she begins with a description of a painting of Thomas Jefferson that hangs in his home, Monticello: "In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs / at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: / his forehead white with illumination — / a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow, / darkened as if the artist meant to contrast / his bright knowledge, its dark subtext." She suggests that the painting itself highlights the two warring aspects of Jefferson: "his bright knowledge" contrasting sharply with the shadows of "dark subtext." This foreshadows the later parts of the poem, where Trethewey debates with her father about the contradictions of Jefferson's life. The "dark subtext" she refers to is Jefferson's ownership of slaves and his well-known but unacknowledged affair with his slave Sally Hemmings. As in the other examples, this word choice weaves the poem's themes into all of its imagery, casting Jefferson's history in a new, less flattering, light.
In her most recent book, Monument (2018), Trethewey makes use of more experimental forms. In "Meditation at Decatur Square," she writes in free verse, with irregular indentation and line length, describing various historical monuments before reaching this concluding stanza: "Here, it is only the history of a word, / obelisk, / that points us toward / what's not there; all of it / palimpsest, each mute object / repeating a single refrain: / Remember this." Elsewhere in the poem, she describes various monuments. Here, she highlights how they function as totems of the past, forcing the viewer to acknowledge and remember events and individuals. By choosing such a shifting and irregular form, she demonstrates how these attempts to situate the past are unstable. As the strange alignment of the lines suggests, the meaning of these events is much more slippery than the monuments' architects might have imagined.
The primary through-line of Trethewey's work is her ability to choose a form to suit her content. Her poems display a deep interest in the way history is preserved, from statues and portraits to photographs and family homes. As such, her poems take the shape that most accurately conveys their central points, whether that is a series of linked journal entries or a meticulous ekphrasis of a painting. She shows a continual awareness that the meaning of her words is directly impacted by their structure and how they accumulate significance.
