The Need to Hold Still: Poems

Mueller, Lisel

ISBN 10: 0807106704 / ISBN 13: 9780807106709

Published by LSU Press, 1980

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 264292962

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Need to Hold Still: Poems
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication Date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807106704
• ISBN 13: 9780807106709
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.”

About the Author

Winner of the 2002 Ruth Lilly Prize given by Poetry magazine and a founding member of the Poetry Center of Chicago, Lisel Mueller was the author of seven volumes of poems: Alive Together, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The Need to Hold Still, awarded the 1981 National Book Award for Poetry; Waving from Shore, recipient of a 1990 Carl Sandburg Award; The Private Life, the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and three other volumes.