Josephine Jacobsen, on the other hand, has been trying hard all her long life; her new collection [In the Crevice of Time] charts both her restlessness and her achievement. While Charles Wright's work takes on a formal and intellectual uniformity that becomes fruitlessly repetitive, Ms. Jacobsen has never fallen into such a rut. Born in Canada in 1908, but long a citizen of this country, she has flirted with several modern literary trends—including surrealism and the sort of linguistic diffidence we see in Wright—without ever losing her head to them. By remaining a maker, she rescues her poems from self-parody; she understands the material value of verse, free or measured. Frequently compared to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she shares their reticence and fascination with detail. She especially resembles Bishop in her love of travel; the peripatetic muse has inspired many of her best poems. But her poems would not be so charming if Ms. Jacobsen did not first learn how to make charm happen, as she does in this early poem, “Spring, Says the Child”:

There are words too ancient to be said by the lips of a child—
Too old, too old for a child's soft reckoning—
Ancient, terrible words, to a race unreconciled:
Death, spring. …
The composite heart of man knows their awful age—
They are frightening words to hear on a child's quick tongue.
They overshadow, with their centuries' heritage,
The tenderly young.
Death, says the child, spring, says the child, and heaven. …
This is flesh against stone, warm hope against salt sea—
This is all things soft, young, ignorant; this is even
Mortality.

Charm is the surface beauty that lures us into the soul of poetry; it is precisely the quality most contemporary poetry lacks. In contrast to Wright's Chickamauga, Jacobsen's In the Crevice of Time is worth buying and going back to; we are called to the poems by their precision, their formal affirmations—even though the world they depict trembles with uncertainty. This is not to say there are no flawed pieces in the book; on many occasions she cripples rhythm or adopts language too fragmentary or opaque to matter. I prefer her when she is deliberately commanding. I also find her attitude toward art and life humane, as in the following lines about a prehistoric cave painter:

Our hulking confrère scraping the wall,
piling the dust over the motionless face:
in the abyss of time how he is close,
his art an act of faith, his grave
an act of art: for all,
for all, a celebration and a burial.

I could go on, listing her triumphs in poems like “Birdsong of the Lesser Poet,” “Gentle Reader,” “An Absence of Slaves,” “Pondicherry Blues,” “Mr. Mahoney,” “The Provider,” “The Sisters,” “The Birthday Party” and “Survivor's Ballad,” but there is no space here to do justice to a poet who has done such justice to us.

Giving the world its due—that is a fine task for the poet, not succumbing to some easy and self-defeating relativism. As a reader I appreciate poets who command the page and, better still, the voice. Precise and memorable language arises from such control, and the greatest poets take our breath away by writing nearly always at that pitch. No one considered in this review comes up to that level—Shakespeare has not been reincarnated—but in the best of the twenty-nine books I considered, there were glimmerings of hope for the language, which in turn gave me hope about life. That is a paradox of poetry; it can sing despairingly and find help in the song. It can also tell stories. Both singing and storytelling are poetry's most ancient and enduring functions, and I find it incredible that so many contemporary poets attempt to deny this truth one way or another.