Every once in a while, I discover an exciting new poet, one who has managed to fly beneath my literary radar. That was the case with Lisel Mueller, born in Germany in 1924 who died in Chicago in 2020 and who won the National Book award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this volume in 1997.
I discovered Mueller’s work when her birthday was noted in ‘The Writer’s Almanac’ some weeks ago. In reading about her, I learned that she had lived for many years in Lake Forest, Illinois the childhood home of my college roommate and dear friends, Geoff and Genie. Reading further, I noted that she had graduated from Evansvile College the alma mater of a late, dear high school friend and had taught at Goddard College in our beloved Vermont. So many connections!
When I found her book in the Acton, MA Memorial Library, I read the poem “In Passing” which stood alone on the frontispiece page, and I was hooked. Here’s “In Passing”:
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
It was interesting to read this volume of new and selected poems and to follow the development of Mueller’s poetry from her first book “Dependencies” in 1965 to the new poems of 1996. Her poetry to my reading became more concrete, real, and accessible, and I enjoyed the latest works the best. In her entry in the Poetry Foundation website, Mueller is quoted as saying: “I am always haunted by the sense that I could have been someone else, there but for the grace of God go I, that kind of thing, and that’s a reason I chose as my title poem, or as a title for the book, the poem ‘Alive Together,’ which is in the book and was written quite a few years ago, and which is a kind of catalogue of all the people I was thinking of who I might have been at various times in history, and the miracle and the accident that it is that any of us are who we are.”
I loved this opportunity to meet and enjoy a new poet, one with many connections to my world that I had not been aware of and who has written beautifully of the world.
