What Goes Without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen

Jacobsen-an octogenarian former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (before the post was re-christened National Poet Laureate)-has also made significant contributions to the art of fiction-writing. These 30 short stories, all previously published, are small, highly polished gems often set in exotic locales like the Caribbean, Morocco or Guatemala. ""The Inner Path"" concerns an American journalist who loses his way on a country path in the Central American highlands and experiences a shocking encounter that will have long-term consequences. The untraditional family unit of ""The Mango Community"" is threatened by the political instability on the Caribbean island they've chosen to live on for a year. Because Jacobsen writes with a poet's sensibility, she's less concerned with the polemical contours of political facts than with the effects, great and small, those facts have on individuals. Other stories benefit from an appealingly comic tone. In ""Nel Bagno,"" a woman about to go on vacation gets hopelessly trapped in her bathroom and discovers a wealth of gallows humor she didn't realize she had. Jacobsen's language is clear and filled with vivid images and quiet rhythms: a European in Morocco ""looked as though he had had his blood painlessly extracted and then been sealed again""; as a hysterical housewife drives away from her home, ""the trees parted, parted, parted before her and in a soft cloud on either side rose the dust."" Although many of the stories have lullingly similar shapes, the characters are sharply realized and the situations they find themselves in are startling and evocative. (Dec.)