Second Language: Poems - Hardcover

Lisel Mueller

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807113360 ISBN 13: 9780807113363

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, 1986

Synopsis

Second Language is the fourth volume of work from the highly acclaimed poet Lisel Mueller. The second language of the title, English, supplanted Mueller’s native language when she came to the United States from Hitler’s Germany at age fifteen. But other second languages are at work here as well. The poems in this collection have to do with memory and metaphor, two forces that enable us to interpret our experience. Each is in a sense a second language, and in Mueller’s employ each gains expression in an imaginative and humanistic voice. In “English as a Second Language,” the various meanings of Second Language come together lucidly and effectively.

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Reviews

Mueller's fourth collection in two decades exhibits her continued interests in the imagination's tendency to extrapolate the extraordinary from the mundane. Her tools are the traditional, but lately discredited, techniques of simile, metaphor ("Hope is a fat seed pod"), apostrophe, and personification. She speaks to objects and invents lives for abstractions (the self "stops preserving its tears in amber"), unable to resist investing the world with her own generous sensibility. But so many poems are first-person meditations (even the frequent "you" is an "I" in disguise) that one feels one's attention repeatedly called to the poet's sensitivity rather than to the poem. In the strongest pieces, like "Necessities," the poet steps aside, allowing the most admirable facets of her talent to speak for themselves. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807113360
• ISBN 13: 9780807113363
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72