The Need to Hold Still

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...