The Private Life: Poems

by Lisel Mueller

“Lisel Mueller’s poems are deeply felt and give pleasure because of their truth conveyed in sensuous terms. I found myself earmarking numbers of poems because they were compelling, satisfying, each a thing in itself.”―Richard Eberhart


The forty-three poems in this award winning collection by Lisel Mueller are written with a sense of history, an awareness of the inescapable changes taking place in our century and the effect on how we see our lives.


Each of the poems speaks from a separate moment of experience. Each of them in its own way, celebrates the autonomy of the self, the mysteries of intimacy, growth, and feeling, and the struggle against what one writer has called the “ongoing assault from without to be something palpable and identifiable.”

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

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)

Reviews

[Gail Nyoka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisel Mueller died recently. What a wonderful poet she was. These poems speak of the underground currents of our lives and the society that we live in. Mueller looked beneath the surface, and expressed what she saw there, beautifully. There are lines that made me catch my breath.

[Carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection; I loved the use of language, the themes, the voice - at times disturbing.

[Sarah Lada · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sensual, curious, and sometimes innocent, this book of poetry--darkly--reminded me of childhood. The voice in these poems is that of a self-aware, but privately intimate woman. The poems almost seem like conversations with the self or a conversation to the younger self or a younger other. "Small Poem about the Hounds and the Hares" reminded me of that magical moment of childish envy or displacement I felt as a child with a "bed time". However, the content within the poem is dark, yet full of praise. The child who is forced to go to bed often wonders what the grown-ups are laughing about downstairs. Or why it's so quiet. (Keep in mind--I'm reading this poem for myself, so I relate everything to my self and that often means that the poet's "intent" isn't what I'm feeling):

"After the kill, there is the feast.
And toward the end, when the dancing subsides
and the young have sneaked off somewhere,
the hounds, drunk on the blood of the hares,
begin to talk of how soft
were their pelts, how graceful their leaps,
how lovely their scared, gentle eyes."

And appreciation in this poem is magnificent.

Her poem "Palindrome" is a lovely musing of the forward-moving and backward-moving selves colliding in time.

"Things I will need in the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor radio
Alice Cooper
acne cream
5-year diary with a lock"

It wasn't until the final pages of the book that I was stopped in my tracks the most.

And then there were new words!: "sedum" and "saxifrage".

It's always good to learn new words.

And what a lovely final stanza for the last poem in the book:

"I started out as a girl
without a shadow, in iron shoes;
now, at the end of the world
I am a woman full of rain.
The journey back should be easy;
if this reaches you, wait for me."

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many years ago I worked with Lisel Mueller’s sister – or maybe sister-in-law, I don’t remember – and somehow I ended up with a signed copy of her poems. I’ve carried it around for 30 years but don’t think I’d ever read it until now.

Like most collections of poems, I liked some, I disliked some, I didn’t get some. Overall she is not a poet that particularly resonates with me.

My favorite poem was Love Like Salt:

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being give a thought

It spills on the floor, so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays by the sea

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M946p 1976