Josephine Jacobsen

Josephine Jacobsen Poems

Josephine Jacobsen Biography

Josephine Jacobsen (19 August 1908 – 9 July 2003) was an American poet, short story writer, and critic. She was appointed the twenty-first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. Born in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, she moved with her family to New York at a young age. When she was fourteen, she moved to Maryland where she lived for the rest of her life. Jacobsen served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress from 1971 to 1973 and as honorary consultant in American letters from 1973 to 1979. She served as member of both the literature panel for the National Endowment of the Arts and of the poetry committee of Folger Library. She was a prolific writer of poems and short-stories into her ninth decade. Joseph Brodsky praised her poetry for its "reserve, stoic timbre, and its high precision" while William Meredith called her "post-cocious" for her prolific writing late in life. Jacobsen is the author of several collections of poetry and prose. Among her awards are an Academy of American Poets fellowship and the 1997 Poets' Prize for In the Crevice of Time. She received honorary doctorates from Goucher College, The College of Notre Dame in Maryland, Towson State University, and Johns Hopkins University. She was inducted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and received the Robert Frost Medal for her Lifetime of achievement in poetry. Jacobsen was also a fan of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team and wrote poems on her love of baseball.)

The Best Poem Of Josephine Jacobsen

The Birthday Party

The sounds are the sea, breaking out of sight,
and down the green slope the children's voices
that celebrate the fact of being eight.


One too few chairs are for desperate forces:
when the music hushes, the children drop
into their arms, except for one caught by choices.


In a circle gallops the shrinking crop
to leave a single sitter in hubris
when the adult finger tells them: stop.


There is a treasure, somewhere easy to miss.
In the blooms? by the pineapple-palms' bark?
somewhere, hidden, the shape of bliss.


Onto the pitted sand comes highwater mark.
Waves older than eight begin a retreat;
they will come, the children gone, the slope dark.


One of the gifts was a year, complete.
There will be others: those not eight
will come to be eight, bar a dire defeat.


On the green grass there is a delicate
change; there is a change in the sun
though certainly it is not truly late,


and still caught up in the scary fun,
like a muddle of flowers blown around.
For treasure, for triumph, the children run


and the wind carries the steady pound,
and salty weight that falls, and dies,
and falls. The wind carries the sound


of the children's light high clear cries.

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