Versed in the Blood

Many of the poems in Natasha Trethewey's elegiac third book, Native Guard, relate to growing up biracial in the Deep South, and several focus on the poet's mother, who, in 1985, was murdered by Trethewey's stepfather. The poem "What Is Evidence," for instance, ends by answering the question its title poses: "Only the landscape of her body—splintered / clavicle, pierced temporal—her thin bones / settling a bit each day, the way all things do." Intersecting the personal poems is a section anchored by a sonnet cycle told in the voice of a Civil War soldier serving in the Louisiana Native Guards, the Union Army's first officially sanctioned regiment of black troops. The final poem laments the massacre, ordered by Nathan Bedford Forrest, of black troops at Fort Pillow: "Beneath battlefields, green again, / the dead molder—a scaffolding of bone / we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told."

Another testament against forgetting is David Rigsbee's Cloud Journal, a collection comprised of two 25-sonnet sequences. The first sequence concerns the 1991 fire at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, N.C., that killed 25 workers. "And no savior appears," Rigsbee writes, "except / memory, the gardener leaning on her rake." In the second sequence, a series of lyric meditations written after the death of the poet's mother, Rigsbee writes, "Things connect up and every object / unfolds a story of its movements in time."

People too, especially poets, unfold stories of their movements in time, and Linda Parsons Marion is no exception. "My Inner Earth," the opening poem of her second collection Mother Land, announces, "Rooted in storied past, / my earth sprouts openhearted in the rich / yet to be, drinks what blessings fall unawares." But Marion is no pushover, not even for the forces of nature. "Braced / for the killing frost," she writes in "Old Seeds," "I stand my ground." And in the end, "Let us not live crippled by memory or sight / but in snatches of harmony hard fought."

Natasha Trethewey appears at 3 p.m. Friday in Room 12; David Rigsbee appears at 3:30 p.m. Friday in the Capitol Library; Linda Parsons Marion appears at 2:30 p.m. Sunday in Room 16.