When Josephine Jacobsen was appointed to the first of two consecutive terms as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (now Poet Laureate) in 1971, she was acknowledged, at sixty-three, as a poet of the first rank, the author of four collections of verse that had earned an admiring audience. Her work in criticism, the essay, and short fiction, however, was less well known. The last form she especially loved, and early in her career she had produced stories good enough to attract an agent. Discouraged when none were published, though, she abandoned the form for two decades but found success when she resumed her efforts in the mid 1960s. "On the Island," the first of her new stories, was accepted by Kenyon Review and reprinted in the Best American Short Stories of 1966. Her first collection, A Walk with Raschid and Other Stories, appeared from the Jackpine Press in...