SOURCE: “Lives on Leaves,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, pp. 732–43.

In the following review, Corey offers a laudatory assessment of Mueller's The Need to Hold Still.

In The Need to Hold Still Mueller perfects a voice that has learned to react personally to all people, things, times, and places. The title poem, speaking of an aging woman who gathers bouquets of skeletal winter weeds, renders in human terms what Mueller's voice has learned in poetic terms: living is caring, simplicity can be wisdom. If we care, we can sometimes see ourselves in the world just by speaking its names, without any intervention from any applied forms or notions: “Teasel / yarrow / goldenrod / wheat / bedstraw / Queen Anne's lace / drop-seed / love grass: / plain, strong names, / bread and water.” To become that world, to be governed by its winter, can be immeasurably sad:

A woman coming in from a walk...