SOURCE: “The Whirlpool of Image and Narrative Flow,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 192–208.

In the following excerpt, Stitt provides a positive review of Mueller's Second Language.

Second Language is the fourth book of poems by Lisel Mueller, who was born in Germany in 1924 and came to this country at the age of fifteen. Her conceptual predilection for a poetry that achieves its ends through the use of imagery is indicated both directly and indirectly at many points in the volume—which offers, as a kind of prefatory piece, a poem called “Necessities.” At first glance, the five sections of this poem seem to correspond to the five sections of the book itself, but this turns out not to be the case. Instead, Mueller is here indicating both her general methodology and her central thematic concerns. The fifth section functions almost as a theoretical explanation of how...