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Poet Natasha Trethewey knows her history.

Natasha Trethewey

4 p.m., Nov. 18. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 121 Wall St. Free. 203-432-2977, library.yale.edu/beinecke.

In Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey's 2007 Pulitzer prize-winning volume of poetry, the poetic voice is formal, concise, deliberative. The reader has the sense that the materials of these poems — those based on personal experience and those drawn from historical sources — have been treated with circumspect attention. There is never any sensationalism, confessional grandstanding or picturesque suffering served up as music.

Rather, Trethewey makes us see the value of a formal control over the chaos and injustice of life, specifically the lives of African-Americans in the South. Trethewey, daughter of a white father and black mother, was born in Mississippi in 1966 when such a union was still illegal; thus her own birth was considered "miscegenation." In a poem of that title, the poet neatly links Faulkner's character Joe Christmas, believed to be of racially mixed parentage, and her own name, Natasha, whose meaning she gives as "Christmas child." The poem, in a ghazal structure with each second line ending in Mississippi, renders its facts in declarative sentences, leaving the reader to work out the ironies of the poem's contiguities.

Such reticence is a large part of Trethewey's bid for mastery. In "What is Evidence," the form chosen for a topic as wrenching as her stepfather's violence toward her mother is an unrhymed sonnet. The poem ponders "evidence" of her mother's misery with a detached precision, arriving at a conclusion that suggests what may be the psychological truth of her mother's numb acceptance of her situation: "her thin bones / settling a bit each day, the way all things do."

That detachment keeps Trethewey compelling, because almost any topic can be approached for its historical value, as a clear-eyed comment on life's injustice — not as a victim or an oppressed person might see it but as a survivor with a firm grasp of her own history. Thus, the death of Trethewey's mother becomes the occasion for a stately blues, "Graveyard Blues." The concluding line, "My mother's name, stone pillow for my head," doesn't manifest mourning so much as a grim acceptance of inevitable loss.

In the volume's title sonnet sequence, about a regiment of black soldiers fighting for the North in the Civil War, Trethewey gives expression to the fraught situation of black men fighting alongside white men against white men. The poem presents several incidents, some from the point of view of a soldier of mixed race assigned to guard Confederate prisoners and to write letters home for the illiterate. One section makes much of being "jailors to those who still / would have us slaves" — a line that leaps out of the specified setting, "February 1863," and resonates through the Jim Crow South into Trethewey's own lifetime, where the ironies of the biracial poet standing in for the mixed-race soldier are suggested subtly: "they are wary / of a negro writing . ... I suspect they fear / I'll listen, put something else down in ink."

With the phrase "truth be told," that opens and closes the sequence, what Trethewey, as scribe, puts down in ink are incidents such as white Union soldiers firing on black Union soldiers rather than on Confederates, and of a Union general who refused to bury dead black soldiers.

Speaking as a freed slave who has learned to write, "a man- / servant, if not a man," Trethewey delivers what may be her own dictum: "I'm told / it's best to spare most detail, but I know / there are things which must be accounted for."

In this elegant, precise volume, Trethewey calls much to account.

Donald Brown is a contributor to the New Haven Review.