Elizabeth Jennings – författare

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) is one of the twentieth century's best-loved and bestselling poets. As the author and editor of almost fifty books of poetry, criticism and theology, she received numerous awards, including the W.H. Smith Prize for her 1986 Collected Poems.This New Selected Poems comes forty years on from her first Carcanet Selected, which it honours by retaining her original choices while adding a substantial number of poems from her several later collections. Edited by Rebecca Watts, whose debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Prize, this book is a new take on a poet whose human sympathy and religious faith are transferable and timeless.

The Collected Poems is a new and definitive edition of the poetry of one of the best-loved and most enduringly popular modern poets. Almost all of Jennings's published poetry (including work never before collected) and a large selection of her unpublished poems are included here, together with resources detailing her poetry, prose, essays, plays and correspondence. An afterword draws on her unpublished autobiography 'As I Am' and her unpublished theological prose to illuminate the religious faith at the heart of her poetry. Two previously unseen photographs of Jennings and reproductions of two of her little-known 'picture poems' complete the volume. Emma Mason, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick, has written extensively on religion in English literature. Jennings achievement is, she writes, 'her ability to translate the intensity and happiness of her Christian faith into a canon of accessible poems that reach out to a community of readers'. The Collected Poems enables Jennings's poetry to speak to a new community of readers.

Elizabeth Jennings turned seventy the year this was published. This book of poems is graced by a firm wisdom and achieves moments of religious and individual serenity. "In the Meantime" strives to come to terms with losses, with failure, loves, and most of all with time. It celebrates, too, the ways of nature, and her sorrow and anger for the suffering of others is informed by her own experience, her own loves. Her previous book, "Familiar Spirits," was concerned with memory; here her eyes are on the present and the future, and memory touches her as potentiality. In the Meantime includes sonnets, lyrics, and experiments with free verse, the stanzas always shaped by a pressure of feeling.

Does history tell stories?from 'Concerning History'Yes, if the poet listens carefully. Elizabeth Jennings listens carefully, through spiritual, emotional and mental turbulence. She has created an abidingly popular body of poetry, using traditional forms with experimental vigour, keeping her spirit attuned to her art and language. Her vocation is praise, as a lover praises the things made, the makers and the maker.New Collected Poems incorporates her award winning 1986 Collected Poems, adding from the poems she wrote in the next fifteen years. In that time she found new themes and styles, exploring by means of the verse-essay, the extended sequence, the epistle and love elegy. When experience is extreme, poetry for her is never exorcism, always sacrament, a sharing, a way back form the edge, not over it. As a critic in Every Changing Shape she insisted on continuities in the language if poetry, its contingencies. 'Poets work upon and through each other,' she declared. Within her own work these continuities are brilliant are brilliantly in evidence.