Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Lisel Mueller's poems are marked by clarity and simplicity and reflect a strong feeling for narrative. This collection contains long pieces on Mary Shelley and Helen Keller as well as poems on paintings, fairy tales, and games. Her graceful economy of line is especially effective in capturing the distance between generations and the vision of childhood." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
An adventurer, Lisel Mueller pursues the protean possibilities of communication. In Dreiser's works she finds language solid, "as plain as money, / a workable means of exchange." More often she experiences exhilaration in the shapes that communication makes possible. In "Talking with Helen," for example, she re-creates Heller Keller's flash of discovery when water suddenly became language, the stream that connected time and space, maple leaves and hands.
Mueller's poetry links varying forms: music and discourse, memory and immediacy. Perennial weeds in her title poem recall ancient times and prayerful monks. Musical names--"Teasel / yarrow / goldenrod / wheat / bed straw"--hold the moment still like the echoes of a tolling bell.
"I'm trying to make connections," Lisel Mueller says of her poems, "looking for links between where we have been and where we are going, between the life outside and the life within."