Josephine Jacobsen has published five volumes of poems since her first, Let Each Man Remember, in l940. This is her sixth, with selections of previous ones. It maintains her splendid high standards of seriousness, grace and wit, and above all provides the reader with a plateau from which to view the state of the art generally these days. If the excellences here are infrequently matched elsewhere, it may be essential to those of us passionate about poetry to note the differences, between accomplishment and failure, or simply between Jacobsen's fine work and a general failure of most others to think through the grand questions of poetry for this generation. One is instantly struck, for example, by Jacobsen's love of the English language, of its music, precision and wonderful expressiveness. This love is rare enough now. False theories of language are all the rage. The most pernicious of these— it goes by several fashionable names— is that when meanings are unclear, the fault must lie with the syntax and words, with language itself, rather than with the poet or writer, as if one were to berate the violin for the incompetence of the violinist. Other dismal trends also abound. So- called Language poetry, a fetish of the deliberately incoherent, is busy trying to massacre sense, logic and imagination at one fell swoop. The poetry of political propaganda again offers its fumbling self- righteous roars in bars and coffee houses. Nature poetry has staged a fearsome comeback. The pages of innumerable literary journals resound with sentimental anthems to cows and sheep, with arias celebrating the growth of lawns, with solemn hymns to insects and bushes. The cities are largely forgotten. Ordinary humanity is neglected. Hope, cleverness and insight are treated as musty antiques. A number of our better known poets have skittered into inaesthetic cynicism. Burdened with the great “weight” of these paradoxical times, they publish lyrics sweating with self- pity. This useless emotionalism is often accompanied by an abandonment of technique, a rejection of meaning, arbitrary images that lack development and squads of clichés.

There is not one cliché in this volume. Jacobsen presents no facile victories. Her techniques are usually solid. One knows why her lines end where they end, never sensing that the poet simply ran out of breath.