In South in the World, this empathic leap results in a kind of public poem similar in mode to Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’ or Yeats’s ‘Easter, 1917’, where the poet attempts to shore up the fragments of history. The most significant of these is the titular sequence, ‘South in the World’, which contends with the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009. Written in Switzerland from the inverted seasonal perspective of the northern hemisphere, the poet begins by imagining the scorched antipodean forest regenerating. This terrain – encompassing irreversible damage and death but also regrowth – is mirrored in the poet’s view of the ‘diamantine ferocity’ of Sils Maria’s peaks, where, we learn, ‘Anne Frank / spent two summers’. Slowly, the poem insinuates a loose relationship between the devastated Victorian landscape and that of a post-Shoah Europe, tied by the unthinkable ‘greening’ that occurs after calamity: ‘you who endured that unendurable night, / praying that the dead were still alive: / is it too much to grasp the greening of things / that were black and charred?’

Rather than make an overt comparison or metaphor of the two wracked landscapes, with all the attendant problems that would imply, Jacobson juxtaposes the two without intervention. The poem consequently ends in an elegiac, meditative mood, withholding the sort of revelatory statement we might expect in a poem of this nature.

The Shoah and its legacy returns again in several compelling poems: ‘Photographs of Jews’, ‘Limping into Jerusalem’, ‘Old Nazis’, and ‘Anne Frank’s Sister Falls from Her Bunk’, an imagined monologue in the voice of Anne Frank about her sister Margot’s death from typhus at Bergen-Belsen. The poem envisages Anne’s death as an ascent up a ladder, ending with imagery that recalls both concentration camp crematoria and the Black Saturday fires:

Each night I climb a few more rungs
up the ladder out of myself
into the attic where we hid once, quiet as bones.
The sky is improbably blue.
I am rising like smoke towards you.

Jacobson’s images do not pull their punches, and appear simple at first glance. They gain their efficacy from their powerful interplay between the figurative and literal. The poem reimagines the facts of Frank’s life metaphorically, jolting us into a visual encounter with a set of iconic imagery. Such archetypes clearly assume an urgent personal dimension for the poet, who tells us elsewhere that she has ‘dreamt of rough serge coats / of escaping camps / and being sent to them’. Jacobson confronts these fears directly in declarative lines of relatively equal length, largely eschewing complex metaphors in favour of a lean, forthright style.

‘Jacobson’s images do not pull their punches, and appear simple at first glance’

This directness works best in the more personal poems, where Jacobson interrogates ageing, motherhood, and the fraught dynamics of familial relationships. In ‘Triage’, the poet feels a sexual jealousy that ‘rattles [her] bones’ as she watches her lover give a ‘pretty girl’ a cello lesson, stating baldly, ‘I can’t compete with youth or classical dexterity’. Many of these poems anatomise the body’s frailties, and the forces – gravitational, sexual, psychological, spiritual – that pull us, often in conflicting directions. ‘Walking the Black Dog’, one of Jacobson’s finest poems, examines depression by taking Churchill’s familiar metaphor of the black dog literally; the speaker sees depression as a pet she cannot discard, train, or subordinate, before asking it a sinister trail of rhetorical questions: ‘where can we walk? / Not by the river; you might hurl me in, / Not in the mountains; you might hurl me off.’

‘Countering this psychic stagnation are more optimistic poems that probe the phenomenological and evolutionary intersections between the animal and human worlds’

Countering this psychic stagnation are more optimistic poems that probe the phenomenological and evolutionary intersections between the animal and human worlds. The wonderful ‘Amphibian’ recalls Jacobson’s mesmeric verse novel The Sunlit Zone (2012) in its interest in our aquatic progenitors, envisaging the pregnant body as part of a continuum stretching back to a world of ‘bright light and breathing fluid’. Several poems are also concerned with horses, which, alongside their mythical winged counterpart Pegasus, are mostly associated with adolescence, imminence, and vitality. Toward the end of the collection, however, we meet Napoleon’s majestic steed in ‘War Horse’, a final ekphrastic poem which returns to the motif of unacknowledged suffering set out in the book’s opening. While ‘great men’ like Napoleon ‘die with ceremony’, the poet notes, ‘not so their horses’ who ‘twist piteously / as the battle continues’. Jacobson, however, is the sort of poet who finds meaning in such unilluminated corners of the canvas, her poems balancing their fidelity to history with wit and imagination, poised, as she says in ‘Take Off’, ‘on the dreamy edge / of light and invention’.