Native Guard.

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey Houghton Mifflin, March 2006 $22, ISBN 0-618-60463-4

In Trethewey's third collection, the dead take center stage. From the empty spaces her deceased mother leaves to the empty spaces of forgotten black history, Trethewey attempts to fill in holes. The history of Mississippi centers the text with her parents' interracial marriage and mother's death framing a bittersweet collection.

Trethewey is a technically sound poet who competently uses the blues, sonnets and other traditional forms. In poems for her mother, Trethewey's poetic voice is filled with the phlegm of grief and longing. In "Graveyard Blues." she writes, "The road going home was pocked with holes, / That home-going road's always full of holes; / Though we slow down, time's wheel still rolls. / I wander now among names of the dead: / My mother's name, stone pillow for my head."

Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, writes a sequence of poems that renders the voices of the first officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army.

The sequence is a masterful weaving of sound and sense. These men, who have gone unrecognized by history, are held in her pages for just a moment. She writes, "General Banks was heard to say I have / no dead there, and left them, unclaimed. / Last night, I dreamt their eyes still open--dim, clouded/as the eyes of fish washed ashore, yet fixed-- / staring back at me."

In Trethewey's poems, each word, each line represents syllables uttered in the mouths of those silenced by grief, pain and history.

--The preceding titles were reviewed by Kelly Norman Ellis Kelly Norman Ellis is the author of Tougaloo Blues (Third Worm Press, 2003).