Domestic Work | Natasha Trethewey

Domestic Work | Natasha Trethewey | The debut collection of her poetry

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Domestic Work

	Domestic Work Natasha Trethewey Graywolf Press, 2000 - 64 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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In this debut collection, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

lovely and piercing

This is a wonderfully lucid and evocative first book, with crystalline imagery, full-bodied pathos and sensuality. Ripe, earthy, plain-spoken beauty confirms this new poet's gifts, for lyric precision and emotional honesty, on every page.

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The debut collection of her poetry

Natasha Trethewey has won the Grolier Poetry Prize and her individual pieces have been widely published in a variety of places. Domestic Work is the debut collection of her poetry and will well serve to introduce her work to a whole new audience of appreciative readers. Housekeeping: 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 sou. Beating rugs against the house,/we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading/across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw/the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs/out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie./I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,/listen for passing cars. All day we watch/for the mail, some news from a distant place.

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Enjoy the Imagery

I've never been a big fan of poetry. While there are a few well written poems that I have understood and enjoyed in life, most just seemed like, um, gobbledy-gook on paper. Maybe this stems from the way we teach poetry in this country, but that's a topic for discussion on another day.

These poems of Natasha Trethewey's, though, really speak to me. After hearing an interview with the author my interest was picqued, and so I bought her Native Guard book. I enjoy the voices and points of view that I hear in those poems, but these in Domestic Work are very poignant. I can imagine a way of life that I know very little about, other than stories my great-grandmother told me when I was a little girl. Trethewey's imagery is superb - she creates portraits with her words, and then gives us a little more by telling us what SHE sees these characters doing right before and after this snapshot of the lives they lead. This book goes straight to the top of my (VERY short) poetry list.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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