[The following is a positive review of On the Island: New and Selected Stories.]

"The distinction between poetry and prose writers," wrote Shelley (in prose), "is a vulgar error." The vulgar fact is that 81-year-old Josephine Jacobsen, the former Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, is known primarily as a writer of poems. One of them, "Instances of Communication," begins with the ambiguous declaration: "Almost nothing concerns me but communication." And, at first glance, the 20 exquisite stories she has collected in On the Island seem to concern nothing, almost.

Consider "The Jungle of Lord Lion," which is set, like several other offerings, on an imaginary Caribbean island named Boudina. Fastidious Mrs. Pomeroy's happiness at the guest house called Morne Jaune is marred by the presence of Mrs. Chubb, a boorish bigot who "looked like a nasty sea monster, all blubber and malignancy." Thus Mrs. Pomeroy is stunned when it is she, not the loathsome Mrs. Chubb, who is asked to leave. That is all there is to the plot; nevertheless, Ms. Jacobsen's narrative haiku fits Mrs. Pomeroy's own description of a phrase from Yeats—"the words were as true as bone … it was life held up like a transparency to the blaze of loss."

Ms. Jacobsen's osseous truth is pared of fat; she gives us spare, unsparing tales of spiritual tropism. In "The Night the Playoffs Were Rained Out," Mr. and Mrs. Plessy are transformed after watching baseball on a motel television with the obnoxious Luther and Minna Gombrecht. In "The Wreath," a visitor betrays a patient at the Pine Mount clinic by handing the patient's fantasized shopping list to a nurse. In "Jack Frost," the nonagenarian Mrs. Travis, determined to spend another winter alone in her New Hampshire homestead, trips in her garden but manages to crawl inside the house.

James Gantry, on his honeymoon in Fez in "A Walk with Raschid," feels contempt for "those dreadful, contrived stories in which at the last moment someone is run over, his mother falls dead, he is arrested, or locked in a windowless room." That is a catalogue of endings for several of the consummately contrived stories in On the Island. In others, despite Ms. Jacobsen's apparent discomfort with the crudity of merely recounting a story, a terminally ill maid is suffocated by her employer, a Guatemalan peasant severs the index finger of a human-rights investigator, a priest inadvertently backs his car off a Vermont mountain, a man in bed during an idyllic Caribbean vacation is decapitated. But what is sensational about these stories is less the events they rehearse than their delicate designs. They demand to be reread, since Ms. Jacobsen, unlike O. Henry, resolves nothing with her surprise endings.

It is not quite a windowless room into which Jane Glessner is locked, and her claustration occurs at the outset, not the end, of "Nel Bagno." Moments before she is to depart for Italy, Mrs. Glessner, a writer, finds herself stuck in her own bathroom with little more than an Italian phrase book, her wits and her words. "Nel Bagno" is a parable of the writer's calling, a desperate effort to break out of the isolation into which each of us is locked. Whether in New England, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Acapulco, Central America, Morocco or Boudina, Ms. Jacobsen's characters, like Jane Glessner, inhabit what Wallace Stevens called an island solitude under an old chaos of the sun. Against Donne's assertion that "no man is an island," the stories in On the Island give each one of us in the human archipelago, like Odysseus before the Cyclops, the name of Noman.