[In the following excerpt, McGraw positively reviews On the Island, praising Jacobsen's treatment of the themes of loss and isolation and her unsentimental characterization.]

The stories in Josephine Jacobsen's On the Island don't fall immediately into overarching categories. The collection is new and selected work published over the past twelve years, and the stories cast a wide net encompassing age and youth, the battles between men and women, and the battles we carry on to know ourselves. But Jacobsen relies on place to a striking degree for activating her stories: actions occur because people are where they are—Baltimore, Mexico, the Caribbean—and couldn't happen anywhere else. A tourist, unfamiliar with the undertow of a local beach, is swept out to sea; a man is forced to die within the confines of a world so narrow he is trapped by his own men's club; and even in "Nel Bagno," an odd and comic piece in which a woman is trapped in the bathroom of her own house, it is the confines of the room itself—the small window and smooth tiles—that hold her back, so that the physical reality of the room becomes her enemy.

Jacobsen deals most frequently with loss, and in particular with unanticipated loss. More broadly, her stories tend toward representations of isolation, and they feature the places that are unfamiliar, where we and the characters are forced to look around carefully. In "The Mango Community," a few Americans staying on a small Caribbean island must determine what to do as the native society around them swells and bristles with coming revolution. Should the visitors stay and declare solidarity? Should they return with their children to their own home, the place of safety? For Jacobsen, identity is formed by action, and the story's deepest question is this: What, finally, is our identity?

Attachment to the land or detachment from it jars these characters into awareness. Feigning ignorance of the dangerous undertows of Mexico, a young husband can lose his beautiful, gentle wife as he reaches for her wanton half sister. Well-meaning Americans can cause boys to be killed in the Caribbean or Morocco, the very wideness of their intended mercy more than the culture can absorb. Or in her own home an aging woman can bring on her own death, seeing the early frost come and knowing what such a frost means, in New Hampshire, to a woman in her nineties and alone.

Jacobsen is known primarily as a poet, and her poet's sense of structure and language are everywhere apparent here. Not only are some of her characters remarkably familiar with contemporary poetry (Father Haggerty, in "Late Fall," has published poems in Foxfire and Lillabulero, and he quotes Howard Nemerov to his weary pastor), but the language is gorgeous and embellished, filled with little gifts. Beyond the restraining wall "the Caribbean glared and glittered," and an American thinks about feeding the fish she can't see beneath its surface, imagining "the demented maze and flicker of hunger." Metaphors are a part of the terrain of this language: "the marriage split like an old rowboat"; "her hand, like the paw of a starving bear after fish, had darted down"; waves of fatigue curdle over a man.

In a certain sense the stories are also structured like poems, turning on the finest point of near-revelation. Such moments come when characters are closest to seeing themselves in a new light, one cast by strangeness or illness or age. These are moments of epiphany, but Jacobsen makes them tight and compressed—and gone before the characters realize their full import, because in these pieces life is unruly and pushes us along before we're ready. In "Late Fall," for instance, Father Consadine escapes his Nemerov-quoting curate and slips into church:

He put his hands down and sat back in the pew. For any acknowledgment of his presence, he might have been back at his desk. It was all wrong; he had lived by personal encounter, by grace or the experience of grace. That encounter, that sense of grace, had become rarer and rarer. Suppose finally it never came again? Well then, he would wait.

Who was he to be disappointed, to dictate the occasion of meeting?

And the story moves on. As readers, we must be quick on our feet.

On the Island is a rich collection and a large one (twenty stories across 250 pages), reminiscent often of V. S. Pritehett and Graham Greene in the texture of its language. Jacobsen writes with some formality but never with distance, plunging us into the centers of her characters' lives, into the hopes—and the fears—they haven't articulated even to themselves. She has maturity of craft and, more important, of vision. Her lens is wide, clear, and unsentimental; there is room for all of us to play in her stories, for all of our hopes and tragedies. She doesn't shy away from anything, and in the end her collection feels as broad and various as the world.