Title: DOMESTIC WORK

Author(s):Kevin Young
Source:Ploughshares. 26.4 (Winter 2000): p205. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type:Book review
Bookmark:Bookmark this Document

DOMESTIC WORK Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper.

In a voice confident, diverse, and directed, Natasha Trethewey's Domestic Work does
what a first book should, and more, all while avoiding what first books often do--either
borrowing themes from other poets or recycling a narrow vision of family life.
Here, Tretheweybrilliantly discusses family not for its extremes or its small hurts, but
rather for the small intimacies that symbolize larger sufferings of history, both personal
and public.
This distinction between family as Narcissus's mirror and as tributary to the present may
seem minor, and in other hands it might be. But inTrethewey's hands--hands being a
constant theme here, as we might expect from the book's title--the smallest details sing.
"Family Portrait" describes "the picture man" who comes to her house; only several
stanzas later do we realize that this is, fittingly, a sonnet. In many ways, this unself-
conscious use of form has the New Formalists beat--for a book about work, we rarely
see Trethewey sweat--and, throughout, she uses transparent form to chronicle all too
invisible lives: "Mama and I spend the morning/cleaning the family room. She
hums/Motown, doles out chores, a warning--// He has no legs, she says, don't stare."
The look, or its avoidance, haunts Domestic Work. So does photography, which opens
the book in "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process." In describing two women from a 1902
photograph, the poem literally views a woman in the act of becoming: "Even now, her
hands circling,/the white blur of her apron/still in motion."
The contradictions of stillness and motion are what Trethewey's poems seek to
capture, questioning whether we can ever nail down (or up) a moment, a life, or history--
particularly that belonging to women. As such, the second section praises in caption-like
poems the poet's grandmother in work and in love. From "Domestic Work, 1937" to
"Self-Employment, 1970," the section progresses toward independence while moving
effortlessly from free verse to sonnets to quatrains, even encompassing the blues of
Robert Johnson. Along the way, we have the humiliation of her grandmother's job in a
"Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956," where "the colored women filed out
slowly/to have their purses checked,/the insides laid open and exposed/by the boss's
hand." With perfect pitch and humor, the poet captures a grandmother's subtle revenge
in "the soiled Kotex/she saved, stuffed into a bag/in her purse, and Adam's look/on one
white man's face, his hand/deep in knowledge." With such history and resistance, with
such a casual yet formal style, no wonder Rita Dove selected this volume for the
inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Here, family is constantly incomplete, often only gestured toward--we soon learn that
the photo by the picture man is the family's "only portrait"--yet another perspective filled
with loss. Still, Trethewey cannot look away; instead, "I watch him bother // the space
for knees, shins, scratching air / as--years later--I'd itch for what's not there." Absence is
what the rest of the poems circle, describing a mother "who will not reach/forty-one," a
father's long-gone boxing career "holding his body up to pain," or the poet's own "White
Lies" as a mixed-race child who "could easily tell the white folks/that we lived
uptown,/not in that pink and green / shanty-fled shotgun section / along the tracks."
The book ends beautifully, and confidently, with a poem selected for this year's Best
American Poetry. In "Limen," the poet listens "to the industry / of a single woodpecker,
worrying the catalpa tree / just outside my window." The woodpecker's "task" is much
like Trethewey's: "his body is a hinge, a door knocker/to the cluttered house of memory
in which/I can almost see my mother's face." Lucky for us,Trethewey sounds out the
wood much like the bird: "All day ... at work, / tireless, making the green hearts flutter."

Kevin Young's first book, Most Way Home, which won the Zacharis First Book Award,
was recently reprinted by Zoland Books. In spring 2001, Zoland will release his second
book of poems, To Repel Ghosts. He also edited Giant Steps (HarperPerennial), an
anthology of new African-American writers.