SOURCE: Shaw, Robert B. Review of The Sisters, by Josephine Jacobsen. Poetry 152, no. 1 (April 1988): 40-1.

In the following review, Shaw commends Jacobsen's poetry for “the consistency with which she unites firmness of technique with intelligence and feeling.”

How many poets do we have who can make a moral point without pomposity? The answer is: Not many. Josephine Jacobsen [in The Sisters] is one of the few. An especially fine instance of this ability of hers comes in “An Absence of Slaves,” when she describes her Greek tour guide boasting that the Parthenon was built with free labor. The poem ends:

… she said: “The city sent a slave to each man's yoke, oil press and furrow, to free for toil the free Greek: 

the free raised these!” she cried to the blue sky and honey- veined columns. “This is no pyramid.” And I saw the loins and wrists and...