附註:Includes bibliographical references (page 223).
Curriculum Vitae -- Place and Time -- Immortality -- Losing My Sight -- An Unanswered Question -- Eyes and Ears -- Paper-White Narcissus -- Midwinter Notes -- Pillar of Salt -- Statues -- The Laughter of Women -- Pigeons -- Imaginary Paintings -- Things -- Tears -- Mirrors -- An Afterlife -- Heartland -- American Literature -- Silence and Dancing -- The Late-Born Daughters -- Happy and Unhappy Families I -- Happy and Unhappy Families II -- Reader -- Animals Are Entering Our Lives -- Why I Need the Birds -- A Short History of the Rose -- In November -- Night Voyage: A Dream -- Captivity -- The Blind Leading the Blind -- In the Thriving Season -- The Power of Music to Disturb -- On Finding a Bird's Bones in the Woods -- Cicadas -- The Mermaid -- Moon Fishing -- A Grackle Observed -- The Lonesome Dream -- The Queen of Sheba Says Farewell -- Figure for a Landscape -- "O Brave New World, That Hath Such People in It" -- In Memory of Anton Webern, Dead September 15, 1945 -- Whoever You Are: A Letter -- Small Poem About the Hounds and the Hares -- Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny -- Highway Poems -- The Fall of the Muse -- The Biographer -- January Afternoon, with Billie Holiday -- Life of a Queen -- Alive Together -- My Grandmother's Gold Pin -- On Reading and Anthology of Postwar German Poetry -- What the Dog Perhaps Hears -- Palindrome -- Snow -- The Private Life -- The Late News -- A Nude by Edward Hopper -- In Praise of Surfaces -- Naming the Animals -- Love like Salt -- The Concert -- A Farewell, a Welcome -- Hope -- Letter from the End of the World -- For a Thirteenth Birthday -- Another Version -- Drawings by Children -- Fiction -- Sometimes, When the Light -- Beginning with 1914 -- Talking to Helen -- Daughter -- Merce Cunningham and the Birds -- Not Only the Eskimos -- Found in the Cabbage Patch -- One More Hymn to the Sun -- The Cook -- Picking Raspberries -- The Need to Hold Still -- Voices from the Forest -- The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley -- The Story
摘要:In a collection that represents over thirty-five years of her writing life, this distinguished poet explores a wide range of subjects, which include her cultural and family history and reflect her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language. In fact, her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality - "the hard, dry smack of death against the glass". To this community Mueller presents moments after moment where the personal and public realms intersect, where lives ranging from her own to those of Mary Shelley and Anton Webern illuminate the ways in which history shapes our lives. In "Brendel Playing Schubert", Mueller's breathtaking linguistic virtuosity reminds us how music can transport us out of ourselves and into "the nowhere where the enchanted live"; in "Midwinter Notes", the,crepuscular world, stripped of its veil, shines forth as a signal from some realm where the sense of things may be revealed. In the title piece Mueller brings a sense of enduring and unclouded wonder to a recognition of all those whose lives might have been our own.
