[In the following excerpt, Heller praises Jacobsen's use of language in The Sisters: New and Selected Poems.]

Josephine Jacobsen's poetry has always been a matter of the cool ear over the fanciful eye. The Sisters, which gathers poems from nearly 50 years, demonstrates not only scrupulous verbal craft but a kind of auditory seriousness, a preference for depth and precision over mere charm or beauty. In "Winter Castle" (1940), she conjures up a picture of "the owl that … shall serve as nightingale." In a later poem, she writes of "the shade-seller," a man at a bull-fight who sells one a seat out of the direct glare of sun and blood. Such images hint at Ms. Jacobsen's lyricisms, which seem always adumbrated by night vision.

In her most recent poems, among the strongest she has written, the voice is even deeper and more simplified. It is as though the poet were relying on Browning's "purged Ear," which "apprehends Earth's import." For Ms. Jacobsen, such apprehension means the discovery of both death and renewal, often entwined, as in one poem about swimmers floating over a "necropolis of the fish":

     So, out of the deeps of sleep
     where they cannot keep company—
     chosen, at least—
     from the fathoms of memory, one
 
     by one, at morning, they rise
     into themselves, into their limbs, the new
     sight of the old sun on their sea.
     As though they would, always, wake.

One hears in that "always" a half-fleeting stay of the music in the stanza, as if the idea that one were going to live forever had momentarily snagged on truth.

Ms. Jacobsen's theme is often regeneration—but in a minor key, a matter of limited befores and afters or of contraries arising out of the play of the real and the imagined. The witty title poem of this volume pits "A" against "B," two sides of the poet's psyche who sometimes disagree and are only reconciled by bearing common witness to the world: "amicably they watched the blood orange dip / into water, then stars, larger and brighter than elsewhere. / Before bed, A looked at herself in the mirror, using B's eyes."

The poet, who has spent a long life at her craft, is most powerful in splendid, oblique meditations on death:

     What must be said of clouds is: they are silent.
     Their silence is flawless….
 
     Death is equally silent but does not move.
     I think a good thing to see before the quiet that is
     motionless, would be the bright soundless motion.
 
     This silence fills the ear like another music.
     It appeases. How much time in which to be
     grateful is roughly sufficient?

Sound and word are caught in endless refractions in such passages. In Ms. Jacobsen's craft, language seems as flawless as silence.