SOURCE: “Naming the Unnamable, ” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 15, January, 1998, pp. 18–19.

In the following essay, Townsend provides a laudatory review of Mueller's Alive Together.

I always approach “new and selected” collections of poetry with some trepidation, curious to see what has been chosen as most representative, but afraid preceding collections will be diminished or diluted, depth sacrificed for breadth. Happily, … Lisel Mueller's Alive Together introduce readers to the work … with all the immediacy of earlier collections, leavened by substantial amounts of new work.

Writing in the persona of Mary Shelley in a poem called “The Triumph of Life,” Lisel Mueller says, “In any age, life has to be lived / Before we know what it is.” Alive Together represents over 35 years of Mueller's writing on subjects as diverse as her cultural and family history, her fascination with music and folklore, her belief in the abiding power of language...