The Mississippi-born poet Natasha Trethewey has an exalted résumé — she has served two terms as poet laureate, and she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her collection “Native Guard” — but her poems are earthy; they fly close to the ground.

Like Philip Levine, who wrote about working-class life in Detroit, Trethewey observes the lives of people who toil with their hands: seamstresses, maids, beauticians, and the dock and factory workers in and around her hometown of Gulfport.

These are people who arrive home late and, spent from the day’s hassle, tend intimately to one another. In an early poem called “His Hands,” a man returns from the docks and from working crab traps for his family’s supper, and we read:

Putting her hands to his, she pulls him in,

sets him by the stove. Slowly, she rubs oil

into his cracked palms, drawing out soreness

from the swells, removing splinters, taking

whatever his hands will give.

The blues in a person’s life tend to settle in, the critic Albert Murray wrote, like bad weather. Weather and trouble walk hand in hand in Trethewey’s work.

Her men and women have been through the devastation of Hurricane Camille in 1969 and, in her later poems, Katrina. They scan the skies, fearful of being sent back to another FEMA trailer of the human soul. (In 2010, Trethewey published a short memoir called “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” It was a missed opportunity, a sometimes vivid book marred, oddly, by stilted academic language.)