|
 Lisel
Mueller
Arguably our state's most-honored living poet, Lisel Mueller has
been awarded several prestigious national literary awards. In 1975,
Ms. Mueller's second collection, The Private Life , was
chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American
Poets. Later, she received the 1980 National Book Award for The
Need to Hold Still . Most recently, her Alive Together:
New and Selected Poems (1996) won the coveted Pulitzer Prize.
Ms. Mueller arrived in this country at the age of fifteen, fleeing
with her family the terrors of Nazi Germany. As her reminiscence “Learning
to Play by Ear” (excerpted elsewhere on this website) relates in
striking terms, Ms. Mueller came to English as her second language,
finding its peculiarities both exotic and flushed with unintentional
metaphor that made of language itself an adventure in understanding.
One can still detect flashes of understanding's swift arrival in
her poems' epiphanies, moments where sudden recognition bristles
across the backdrop of language like heat lightning on a steamy
July night. Never showy or ostentatious, Mueller's poems move with
the modest decorum of the immigrant who wishes not to call attention
to herself. Still, insistent in these poems is Mueller's intersecting
of private and public lives, instants where the personal life resonates
with historical and communal implications. If poetry is, as poet
Robert Kelly asserts, all about “transforming things” and “things
transforming,” then Mueller shows us that process and illuminates
its lasting rewards.
|
