SOURCE: “The Sounds and Silences of Lisel Mueller's The Private Life,” in Contemporary Poetry, Vol. IV, No. 3, 1982, pp. 24–32.

In the following essay, Hentz traces the theme of silence in Mueller's poetry.

The dialectic suggested by such opposites as affirmation and negation, violence and forgiveness, darkness and light, is an integral part of Lisel Mueller's poetry. So although her poetry is filled with music and musicians, one is not surprised to find that it is also concerned with an examination of tangible silence. Aware of life's violences, its cruelties, its despairs, she is also aware of and evokes the silent life around us: a flower coming into bloom after months of denial, a sense of birth and growth, a mysteriousness in life of which we are only partly aware.

Although the most direct statement of this theme can be found in the title poem of the collection The Private...