African American history in Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard”

The article presents interpretations of the poetry collection “Native Guard” of the American writer Natasha Trethewey — the Pulitzer Prize winner (2007), and Poet Laureate (2012–2014). Through the lens of African American and Critical Race studies, Trethewey’s “Native Guard” is analyzed as the artistic Civil War reconstruction which writes the Louisiana Native Guard regiments into national history. Utilizing the wide range of poetic forms in the collections “Domestic Work” (2000), “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002), “Thrall” (2012), — ekphrastic poetry, verse-novellas, epistolary poems, rhymed and free verse sonnets, dramatic monologues, in “Native Guard” (2006) Natasha Trethewey experiments with the classical genres of villanelle (“Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi”), ghazal (“Miscegenation”), pantoum (“Incident”), elegy (“Elegy for the Native Guard”), linear palindrome (“Myth”), pastoral (“Pastoral”), sonnet (the ten poems of the crown sonnet sequence “Native Guard”). Following the African American modernist literary canon, Trethewey transforms the traditional forms, infusing blues into sonnets (“Graveyard Blues”), and experimenting with into blank verse sonnets (“What the Body Can Tell”). In the first part of “Native Guard”, the poet pays homage to her African American mother who was married to a white man in the 1960s when interracial marriage was illegal. The book demonstrates the intersections of private memories of Trethewey’s mother, her childhood and personal encounters with the racial oppression in the American South, and the “poeticized” episodes from the Civil War history presented from the perspective of the freed slave and the soldier of the Native Guard, Nathan Daniels. The core poems devoted to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Louisiana regiments in the Union Army formed in 1862, are the crown sonnet sequence which variably combine the formal features of the European classical sonnet and the African American blues poetics. The ten poems are composed as unrhymed journal entries, dated from 1862 to 1865, and they foreground the reflections of the African American warrior on historical episodes of the Civil War focusing on the Native Guard’s involvement in the military duty. In formal aspects, Trethewey achieves the effect of continuity by “binding” together each sonnet and repeating the final line of the poem at the beginning of the following one in the sequence. Though, the “Native Guard” crown sonnet sequence does not fully comply with the rigid structure of the classical European form, Trethewey’s poetic narrative aims at restoring the role of the African American soldiers in the Civil War and commemorating the Native Guard. The final part of the collection synthesizes the two strains – the personal and the historical, accentuating the racial issues in the American South. Through the experience of a biracial Southerner, and via the polemics with the Fugitives, in her poems Natasha Trethewey displays that the Civil Rights Act has not eliminated racial inequality and racism. Trethewey’s extensive experimentation with literary forms and style opens up the prospects for further investigation of the writer’s artistic methods in her poetry collections, autobiographical prose, and nonfiction.

The Basis of Robert Bridges’ Metaphoric System in his Late Lyrics

The author’s metaphorical system is an important feature of an individu-al style. The metaphor studies provide information of peculiarities of the au-thor’sconcepts sphere or his mental picture of the world. The article considers the metaphorical system features in the late lyrics of Robert Bridges, the poet-laureate, a prominent representative of the English poetry of the late 19th –ear-ly 20th centuries. The article focuses on the most frequent concept-targets and concept-sources, namely those phenomena that have attracted the writer’s greatest attention and, to his mind, need to be rethought and concepts that are more intuitively clear in the author’s opinion.As a result of the metaphor analys of the poems by Robert Bridges, the information about the peculiarities of the author’s concepts sphere realized in his late lyrics has been received and the frequency core among the concept-sources and concept-targets has been identified and described. On the basis of the obtained data, the article has compared the peculiarities of the metaphoric interpretation in R. Bridges’ late and early lyrics, identified similar features and differences, as well as made conclusions about changes in the author’s mental picture of the world.

Dreadful Dolls: Female Power in Carol Ann Duffy

The article scrutinizes some female characters in four poems of the Scottish poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Starting from the issue of gender construction and feminist theories, the author then shifts the focus onto the deconstruction and then re-writing of identities. The “Dreadful Dolls” of the title are women struggling to regain control of their bodies, and lives. The author points out how these women change their own body nature and appearance to determine the effects on those who claim power over them. These heroines become aware of the power of their gaze, which they use as a weapon or as a shield. They even manipulate their attire in order to reveal or, contrarily, to hide something about themselves. In this work, the author presents women performing the re-writing of their identity and power.