Natasha Trethewey's "Memorial Drive" on her mother's killing

Natasha Trethewey tells me a ghost story. Had they not met, she says, she likely never would have heard some of her mother’s last living moments — recordings she transcribed directly into “Memorial Drive.” Trethewey is a famous poet, to the extent that one can be such a thing in 21st-century America. “When I was growing up, if I did anything well, white people would always say things like, ‘Oh, well, that’s your white side.’” Her parents divorced, and in 1972, Trethewey, called Tasha by her family, joined Gwendolyn in Atlanta, arriving as it was transitioning into what she laughingly calls “a chocolate city.” Trethewey writes with calm and quiet love of the school she entered there, a place where Black intellectuals and heroes were studied year-round and children performed James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation.” Then Joel Grimmette came along. Her race and her mother’s murder were, she says, her “two existential wounds.” There is a twinning of documentary evidence and personal memory in much of Trethewey’s poetry, as in “Memorial Drive.” “Domestic Work” uses photographs of workers in the South to call up memories of “clotheslines sagged with linens,/ a patch of greens and yams,/ buckets of peas for shelling.” “Bellocq’s Ophelia” re-imagines a prostitute in Storyville sitting for real photographs and musing on her own exploitation — body and image. “Native Guard” was dedicated to Trethewey’s mother, and after it won the Pulitzer, journalists mined the poet’s life for background material.