NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Lisel Mueller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose elegant work drew on nature, her experiences as a parent, folklore and history, including her own flight from Nazi Germany as a teenager, died on Feb. 21 in Chicago, where she lived in a retirement community. She was 96.

Her daughter Jenny Mueller, who confirmed the death, said Mueller had been dealing with the aftereffects of pneumonia.

Mueller won the 1997 Pulitzer for “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems,” which appeared some three decades after her first collection, “Dependencies,” in 1965.

“Her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world,” the Pulitzer citation read. “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.’ ”

The quoted line is from a poem in the collection, “The Power of Music to Disturb.” Another in that volume, “On Reading an Anthology of Postwar German Poetry,” spoke to how Mueller’s childhood — she escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 with her mother and sister — had influenced her life and thinking:

America saved me

and history played me false:

I was not crushed

under rubble, nor was I beaten

along a frozen highway;

my children are not dead

of postwar hunger;

my love is back, with his brain

intact; his toes accounted for;

I have forced no one

into the chamber of death.

In other poems she drew inspiration from the bucolic life she found in Lake County, Illinois, north of Chicago, where she lived for many years with her husband, Paul Edward Mueller, whom she married in 1943. Poems like “Moon Fishing” and “Sometimes, When the Light” are full of the imagery of nature.

Language, too, was a favorite subject. “In the new language everyone spoke too fast,” she wrote in “Curriculum Vitae,” the autobiographical opening poem in “Alive Together.” “Eventually I caught up with them.”

She did indeed, as she showed in the wordplay poem “Things,” from the same volume, here in its entirety:

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

Elisabeth Annelore Neumann was born on Feb. 8, 1924, in Hamburg, Germany, to Fritz and Ilse (Burmester) Neumann. Her father was an educator whose anti-fascist views earned him scrutiny by the Gestapo, which at one point picked him up for questioning. He left Germany in 1933, and after stays in several other countries he secured a teaching post at Evansville College, now the University of Evansville, in Indiana. In 1939 he was joined there by his wife, who was also a teacher, and their two daughters.

Mueller had to pick up the English language, with all its nuances and metaphors.

“For a long time, I did not make the connection between ‘a blanket of blue’ and the sky,” she wrote in “Learning to Play by Ear,” a 1990 collection of poems and essays, “nor did I realize that the ‘deep purple’ which falls (over sleepy garden walls) was the shadows of early evening.”

That, she wrote, “caused me to be left unimpressed by the poets we studied in high school,” but then a fellow student introduced her to Carl Sandburg’s poetry.

“Sandburg’s unadorned, muscular, straightforward diction lured me as the painted women under street lamps lured the farm boys in a city named Chicago,” she wrote.

But it would be years before she made a serious effort to become a poet herself. First came a bachelor’s degree in sociology at her father’s university, where she also met her husband.

Though she had written some amateurish poetry when younger, it was the death of her mother in 1953 that spurred her to get serious about the craft, Mueller said.

“The great grief made me want to express myself in a poem,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1993, “and having done that I needed to continue to do so.”

Years later, she captured the moment in “When I Am Asked,” a poem that begins, “When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.” It concludes with this verse:

I sat on a gray stone bench

ringed with the ingénue faces

of pink and white impatiens

and placed my grief

in the mouth of language,

the only thing that would grieve with me.

She was 41 when her first volume of poetry was published. Among those that followed were “The Need to Hold Still,” which won the 1981 National Book Award for poetry.

Paul Edward Mueller died in 2001. In addition to her daughter Jenny, Lisel Mueller is survived by another daughter, Lucy Mueller, and a granddaughter.

One of her most intriguing poems, “Palindrome,” from her Pulitzer-winning collection, was inspired by a list of school supplies one of her daughters had once made.

“My daughter was about 6 or 7 and was not sure of the difference between past and future,” Mueller told The Baltimore Sun in 1997. The girl headlined the list, “Things I Will Need in the Past,” giving her mother a vision of time moving both forward and backward, a person in one version of reality passing someone — perhaps her double — in the other.

“Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am putting on,” it begins. “It is evening in the antiworld where she lives.” The poem ends with this image:

By now our lives should

have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have

passed one another like going and coming trains,

with both of us looking the other way.


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