God's chatter.(Verse chronicle)(Native Guard)(Man and Camel)(Ommateum, with Doxology)(Firstborn)(God's Silence)(Horse Latitudes)(Book review) From: New Criterion | Date: December 1, 2006| Author: Logan, William | COPYRIGHT 2006 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

Natasha Trethewey's well-mannered, well-meaning poems are as confused about race as the rest of us. The daughter of a black mother and white father, she was raised in the deep South of the Sixties, when the civil rights acts had still not penetrated the backwaters of her state. (Some would say that in large swatches of the South they haven't penetrated yet.) Under the miscegenation laws, her parents' marriage was illegal. In Native Guard, she has wrapped a memoir of her childhood a...