SOURCE: Spires, Elizabeth. “Joy & Terror: The Poems of Josephine Jacobsen.” New Criterion 14, no. 3 (November 1995): 28-33.

In the following essay, Spires summarizes Jacobsen's poetic career, characterizing In the Crevice of Time as honest and direct.

Art is long and life is short. Or is it the other way around? On the evidence of In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems, a 258-page volume that spans sixty years of poetic productivity, both art and life have been long and rewarding for Josephine Jacobsen.

The collected poems of a greatly gifted poet may not offer the suspense of a well-plotted novel, but there is still a certain drama in seeing the arc of a life's work fitted between the covers of one book. To read In the Crevice of Time is akin to watching some frightening or wondrous natural process, say a tree or flower blooming, captured in time-lapse...