The Need to Hold Still

Download or read book The Need to Hold Still written by Lisel Mueller and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1980-03-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”