Good poems have some of the qualities of objects; solid, less destructible than their creators, recognizable even in the dark. Josephine Jacobsen’s poems are like that now. Their big, thematic words haven’t tamed them, or blown them apart; the themes have gone into the structure of the poems. Her poems are not about love and death, or about herself in the way confessional poems are. So we can’t name them with names outside the poems. What we might call loss, she sees, by “time’s trick,” fused with its counterpart, permanence: “the rose and green are set now on the apple’s icy bark.” 

Reading these beautiful poems, we see how the “universal” in poetry is structural rather than thematic, a poet’s themes being really promises, suggesting a world we want to inhabit. Josephine Jacobsen’s poems construct out of language a “universe,” a world complete in its own terms, so (hat within it all the poems’ sentences , are universal,” even those that don’t assert anything. A word in one poem answers a word in another, apparently very different poem in the same way that the opposed, polar terms of metaphor are in speech together. Poetry like this stands for something important about language: that we learned it, that language is potentially the human society inside us. 

This intellectual quality of Josephine Jacobsen’s poems is what makes them serious and keeps them from the dark. The disappearance of the subject into the poem is one of the things she means by “silence” (“the gardens go into their/ naked rose”). “Silence,” embraced as it is by quotation marks, sounds highfalutin, but it’s a pretty accurate word. “Silence” is anti-heroic, the opposite of rhetoric, where rhetoric celebrates the claims of power. Of the Eskimo woman in “Food,” there is nothing “heroic to tell.”; from her whole life will no “saga descend.” Her’ ‘clawing for heather, the black curved nails … the witch mask clamped on the bride face/bring nothing, but life for the nourished … Only the/ next day made possible.” The “quest” of “Mr. Mahoney” approaches the heroic—or as much of it as we can stand. He roams the hospital corridors “illicitly,” though before his biopsy he was “tractable” in room 820. 

They have him in a room, but it is not
his. 
Though he has become confused, it is
not in this. 
Mr. Mahoney cannot find his room. 
The patient nurses “gentle him by the elbow,” “spear him from strange doors,” keep saying, “Yours is down this way/Mr. Mahoney.” 
But 820 is a swamp, a blasted heath, 
A dozen times returned, he knows it is 
     wrong.
There is a room in which he does belong. 
 

“Silence” opposes rhetoric as the art of ornamentation. Consider “The Monosyllable.” 

One day
she fell
in love with its
heft and speed. 
Tough, lean, 

fast as light
slow
as a cloud. 
It took care of rain, short 

noon, long dark. 
It had rough kin; 
did not stall. 
With it, she said, 
I may, 

if I can, 
sleep; since I must,
die. 
Some say, 
rise. 

Theme has gone into its structure: first in the shape, like an old English riddle or charm, where the reader waits to see whether the poem will bear the spell the poet has placed on it; and then in the way monosyllables answer each other, as rise answers fall, and the main verb may … rise, however speculative, still subordinates the verbs that interrupt it: sleep, die. 

“Silence” in these poems is itself the possession (rather than the assertion) of power, especially of experience for which words are not adequate: “the illiterate body says hush,/in love says hush; says, whatever/word can serve, it is not here.” The emblem of such power in Josephine Jacobsen’s poetry is the animal. We catch glimpses of a beautiful and terrifying power within us which we can recognize better when we displace it into animals, and even place the animals into the myths of our culture. The crib-bage players behind their glass wall window in “A Hotel in Troy New York” see a “huge swan/ .. . looking in: cumulus-cloud body, thunder-cloud dirty neck/ that hoists the painted face/coral and black. Inky eyes/peer at our lives.” It stands there, “squat on its yellow webs/ splayed to hold/scarcely up the heavy/ feathered dazzle.” then it goes back to the water where it “sets sail/in one pure motion. 
 

and is received by distance. 
That crucial soiled snake neck
arched to a white high curve
received by distance
and the shadowy girl
across the water. 

The child in “The Leopard-Nurser” imagined her vocation to “the speechless hurt great leopards/ … beautiful, fluid and fatal/to all save me, their skilled/and speechless nurse.” Fluid suggests that animal power is not “regulated,” ruled from outside, the way we are by clocks. The woman discovers that she has been nursing a “dangerous” vocation/(the poem resembles Crashaw’s St. Teresa “Hymn”). The knowledge of power and the refusal to have one’s power regulated arbitrarily is frightening. The epigraph to the fine poem “The Clock,” says, “This stream of energy must be regulated… it is done by a process of division.” And the “divisions” of “love’s event/and death’s” bring us to the evil of ordinary silence. 

Negative silence, the refusal or inability to speak, is the soul asleep. The real evil in speechlessness is that without language we are “discrete.” Because language stands for what we have learned, it builds a certain relationship: not eros (“the illiterate body says hush”), not agape (for things may be words, “clear as those hasty sticks/the soldier crossed and held, high/in the rosy smoke for Joan”), but philia, the relation Mrs. Jacobsen always calls cousin. In the family of man, we are all cousins. So calling someone cousin means we recognize the relationship, acknowledge an identity. Speech creates the community of those we talk to directly, struggle with in words, whom we don’t lie to or ignore. The community need for speech is so deep that the lack of it deforms human enterprise: 

All the terrible silences listen always; 
     and hear 
between breaths a gulf we know is
     evil. 
It is the silence that built the tower of 
     Babel. 

Poetry is one way language is “an escape from the discrete.” In its need for the “silence” of speaking indirectly, of pleasure too deep for words expressed in ringings of rime, charged rhythms and leanness of language, and in the way it keeps on trying to speak the unspeakable, it identifies us. In The Chinese Insomniacs there is a “companionable” league of those “who had to watch,” staying awake across time: Crashaw, Hardy (“The Travelers”), Chinese poets in 455 AD and 500 BC, Yeats, Shakespeare, and the poet who watches hunters in the woods outside the writers’ colony. She says that outside, “the lucky/man’s quarry dies,” but inside 

Here, if the hunt succeeds, 
though time’s trick overtakes
the hunter, his quarry 
lives transfixed. 

Often our culture seems to be outside us when we study it, but it is inside us when we speak a more than private truth. Josephine Jacobsen’s literate universe is a token of possible human life. The learned, skilled, practiced “silence” of poetry speaks the images of companionable human life that may help us to hang on to it.

THE CHINESE INSOMNIACS
Josephine Jacobsen
University of Pennsylvania Press,
$9.95, $4.95 paper, 79 pp.