Lisel Mueller
Poet and translator Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was 15. They immigrated to the US and settled in the Mid-west. Mueller attended the University of Evansville, where her father was a professor, and did her graduate study at Indiana University.
Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection; Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award; Learning to Play by Ear (1990); and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Her other awards and honors include the Carl Sandburg Award, the Helen Bullis Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has also published translations, most recently Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1990).
(from Poetry Foundation)
“By the time I arrive at evening, / they have just settled down to rest; / already invisible, they are turning / into the dreamwork of the trees….”
“When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.”
“I search the language for a word to tell you how red is red.”
“This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,our chances of being alive togetherstatistically nonexistent;”
“. . .because we had survivedsisters and brothers, daughters and sons,we discovered bones that rosefrom the dark earth and sangas white birds in the treesBecause the story of our lifebecomes our lifeBecause each of us tells the same storybut tells it differentlyand none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)”
“Late Hours"On summer nights the worldmoves within earshoton the interstate with its swishand growl, and occasional sirenthat sends chills through us.Sometimes, on clear, still nights,voices float into our bedroom,lunar and fragmented,as if the sky had let them golong before our birth.In winter we close the windowsand read Chekhov,nearly weeping for his world.What luxury, to be so happythat we can grieveover imaginary lives.”
“How swiftly the strained honeyof afternoon lightflows into darknessand the closed bud shrugs offits special mysteryin order to break into blossom:as if what exists, existsso that it can be lostand become precious”