SOURCE: Rungren, Lawrence. Review of The Sisters, by Josephine Jacobsen. Library Journal 112, no. 10 (1 June 1987): 116.

In the following review, Rungren declares Jacobsen's The Sisters to be a work of “careful craft.”

Jacobsen's strengths have remained constant through 40 years of work in a variety of forms. Hers is a poetry of careful craft, of a quiet delight in the natural world and a painterly appreciation of light and color. She often employs relationships of distance and circumstance to probe the mystery at the heart of the human condition, whether it be in the finely calibrated closeness of the sisters of the title poem or in the greater division in “The Presences”: “Creatures,” “Clouds,” “Now.” Contrasting circumstances also figure in “April Asylum,” which explores the disjunction between innocence and the horrors of a mental hospital. Including some fine new poems as well as selections from five previous books, this [The Sisters...