Does history tell stories? 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.

Elizabeth Jennings won a Somerset Maugham Award, and many distinctions followed, among them the W.H. Smith Award (1987) and a C.B.E.

About the Author
Elizabeth Jennings, born in Lincolnshire in 1926, has spent most of her life in Oxford. Her first book won a Somerset Maugham Award, and many distinctions followed, among them the W.H. Smith Award (1987) and a C.B.E. Over the last twenty years Carcanet has published many of her books including Selected Poems, Collected Poems, Tributes, Times and Seasons, Familiar Spirits, In the Meantime, Praises, her translations of Michelangelo's Sonnets, her critical meditation Every Changing Shape and her anthology A Poet's Choice

Reviews
"Some of the finest lyric poetry of the 20th century." --Anne Stevenson, the "Sunday Times"



Book Information
ISBN 9781857545593
Author Elizabeth Jennings
Format Paperback
Page Count 401
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd