I do not understand her, in the sense that I cannot paraphrase what she is saying. Yet I feel what she is saying, and it is this ability to communicate with music as well as with ideas which makes her poetry outstanding.

The magnum opus of The Jacob's Ladder is "During the Eichman Trial." Its 165 lines view the tragedy of Eichman's life from several perspectives, all of which lead the reader ineluctably to the same realization:

He stands isolate in a bulletproof

witness-stand of glass,

a cage, where we may view

ourselves, an apparition

telling us something he

does not know: we are members

one of another.

She concludes the third and final section of this poem with a reiteration of this message, but in language characterized by a hyper-emotional, almost agonized tone. With metaphor based on the line "Every scream of fear is a white needle freezing the eyes," she writes

...it is Crystal Night

it is Crystal Night

these spikes which are not

pitched in the range of common hearing

whistle through time