[In the following positive review, Shaw critic states that "what is striking and admirable in Jacobsen's work is the consistency with which she unites firmness of technique with intelligence and feeling."]

How many poets do we have who can make a moral point without pomposity? The answer is: Not many. Josephine Jacobsen is one of the few. An especially fine instance of this ability of hers comes in "An Absence of Slaves," when she describes her Greek tour guide boasting that the Parthenon was built with free labor, The poem ends:

     … she said: "The city
     sent a slave
     to each man's yoke,
     oil press and furrow,
     to free for toil the free Greek:
 
     the free raised these!" she cried
     to the blue sky and honey-
     veined columns. "This is
     no pyramid." And I saw
     the loins and wrists
     and bones and tendons of those disprized
     who in absence reared the great frieze.

Together with the ethical clarity of this, the beauty of description and the precision of diction are also typical of this poet. (How perfect the word "disprized" is here.) What is striking and admirable in Jacobsen's work is the consistency with which she unites firmness of technique with intelligence and feeling. There is an attractive lack of egotism in her writing; it is distinguished instead for its empathy, its awareness of vulnerabilities we all share. She is so poised in manner, so level in tone, that the reader is recurrently startled by how closely the poems take account of peril, deprivation, and mental or moral darkness. In one of several poems set in the Caribbean ["The Night Watchman"], the speaker is awakened by the night watchman's light and muses:

     Dogged as cock or dog, his light will return.
     Protection! Protection? While
     the thin knives of the clock
     shred minute by minute, and the sea
     turns over its bones?

In a much earlier poem, "The Eyes of Children at the Brink of the Sea's Grasp," the children in an "ecstasy of panic" play in the waves:

           … down the shining
    Dark slope of invitation, outward, to the prize
    Of shaping danger they go—and widen their eyes
    Innocent and voluptuous.

To grow up, of course, is to lose that innocence, and Jacobsen's poems are everywhere touched by the foreboding knowledge which replaces it.

Like the children braving the waves, she has been willing to take risks. She has remained open to formal innovation, and each of her volumes had among its contents poems which are fresh and surprising—not exotic, momentarily diverting "experiments," but new and individualized strategies for poetic success. (The macaronic "Phrases in Common Use," the bouncy "Pondicherry Blues," and the monosyllabic "The Monosyllable" are examples.) She has taken another risk, where reputation is concerned, in publishing considerably less than many of her contemporaries have done in the span of almost fifty years represented in this book. It contains selections from six previous volumes and a group of new poems, but remains at 132 pages unusually compact as a summing-up. In a society which prizes quantity as much as ours, Jacobsen's choice of writing only when she has had something significant to say has probably cost her some attention. In the long run, though, quality is what counts; and I venture to predict that this book will continue to be taken from the shelves to be read when many another weightier one is taken down only to be dusted.