Publishers Weekly,One turns to Jacobsen's poems not for flashy, egotistical juggling, but as to an old friend, for her dependable, philosophical voice, rich in technique and free from clich���. She imagines eliminating the ``monosyllable love'' from our language in the hope that someone ``will enunciate a syllable/ of force'' to replace it. ``What small/ metaphors we set/ ourselves,'' she laments elsewhere, and in poem after poem proves this need not be the case. Her gaze is often directed outward, sighting the estranged or deformed: clowns with highly individualized sorrows, deaf-mutes watching baseball. Whatever handicaps these subjects bear don't generate pity; if anyone seems deficient it will be the reader. Because her poems don't fall into easily recognizable categories- political, confessional, nature, or even formalist poetry (though she writes well in her share of forms)-Jacobsen is seldom anthologized. Yet her work has withstood the test of time better than many of her more-often-read contemporaries from the 1940s and 1950s. Her latest poems are modern and forceful. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
