In 1997, partly as a distraction after Eric's death, Spires helped the poet collect her prose works into a book, The Instant of Knowing, which includes 21 of the searching, often funny essays she published in The Sun.
Sarabande Books published Contents of a Minute this April. It's a modest work compared to, say, In the Crevice of Time, the 1995 opus that collected her works up to that time, but the chapbook (the term refers to pocket-sized pamphlets that first became popular in 16th-century England) is a fitting bookend to a career that spanned eight decades. It includes eight poems that Jacobsen wrote in her 20s and 30s - works that never came to light until 2003, when they turned up in a packing trunk someone bought in a New Hampshire auction. (The winner contacted Spires.)
The bulk, though, are poems she wrote during her last decade and a half, a period when, as Spires saw it, the artist, like a plant being pruned or a poem trimmed, became more fully herself even as time removed friends, family and former pastimes.
From the late 1990s on, Jacobsen was so frail that she could barely type or pick up a pen, but she still created a poem every few months, dictating the contents to her secretary.
"Charlotte, this poem has been going through my head all night; I didn't sleep a wink," she told Blaylock one morning. She proceeded to recite its 11 lines.
The poem, now called "The Companions," is included in Contents of a Minute. "Living close to death / Is not just a case of breath after breath," Jacobsen writes. "It is to realize that to fraternize / with the dark prince is possible and wise."
"It's clear she's writing to her concerns of the moment," says Alice Quinn, the former poetry editor of The New Yorker, which published the poem in 2002 - the last of Jacobsen's 23 that ran in the magazine and the last one she ever wrote.
It also reflects what Quinn calls Jacobsen's "reckoning gaze," her "sense of crystalline meditation" and her "appraising glance" at life, qualities on display throughout the chapbook.
So are the poet's characteristic mirth and one or two of her favorite topics. Public radio star Garrison Keillor read one of the poems, "Baseball as Etiquette," last week on his national show The Writer's Almanac. (Jacobsen never lost interest in her beloved Orioles.)
