SOURCE: Deen, Rosemary. “Eyes That Do Not Sleep at Dawn.” Commonweal 114, no. 10 (22 May 1987): 322-23.

In the following essay, Deen presents Jacobsen's poetic themes and images through an analysis of ten representative poems.

Any moment now Josephine Jacobsen's seventh volume of poems will be out: The Sisters: New and Selected Poems, (South Carolina: The Bench Press, 1987). Her first book, Let Each Man Remember, appeared in 1940, so this makes her forty-seventh year as a public poet. She has just returned from a gathering of the Poetry Consultants to the Library of Congress, a position she held from 1971 to 1973. She has done her stint of work for the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and co-authored two volumes of criticism. She is a distinguished reviewer of poetry, identifying the ways of the poet with an intelligent and savory discrimination. She has been in an old-fashioned sense, a woman...