Second language : poems
/ by Lisel Mueller
- Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 1986.
- 72 p. ; 24 cm.
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.