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Selected Poems

Elizabeth Jennings

Cover Picture of Selected Poems
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 20th Century, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
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(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847779939
£9.95 £8.96
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  • Not how the sun was plausible at morning
    Nor how it was distributed at noon,

    And not how much the single stone could show
    But rather how much brilliance it would shun;

    Simply a paring down, a cleaving to
    One object, as the star-gazer who sees

    One single comet polished by its fall
    Rather than countless, untouched galaxies


    from 'The Diamond Cutter'
       
    Selected Poems draws on all the books Elizabeth Jennings published before Growing-Points. It represents the poet's own distillation of the first two decades of her writing - the poems which established her as one of the most passionate and precise of our writers, a woman of humane values, religious vision and natural sympathy. 'The outstanding thing about Jennings's poetry' wrote Douglas Dunn, 'is its wisdom, hard earned from grief and religious faith.' And Peter Levi says, 'She is one of the few living poets we could not do without.'
    Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1926, and lived most of her life in Oxford, where she moved in 1932. She was educated at Rye St Antony and Oxford High School before reading English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she began a B.Litt., but left to pursue a ... read more
    Praise for Elizabeth Jennings 'Anyone who likes poetry will love it if you get them Carcanet's Collected Poems of Elizabeth Jennings. It costs a bit but you do get well over 1,000 poems, with barely a duff one; heck, you could even give it to someone who doesn't like poetry, and suggest it will change their mind.'
    Nicholas Lezard, the Guardian, 1st December, 2012
    'But there is no sterility here: I defy you to read "A Living Death" and not be on the verge of tears by the end of it ("I am caught up / Within a death that does not die") This is a supremely dippable-into book. Its bulk is liberating, not intimidating.'
    Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, Tuesday 3rd April, 2012.
    'Offers a broad selection of her best work ... in all its tenderness, insight and acute, stepping-on-ice vulnerability'

    Michael Glover, The Tablet.

    'it contains some of the finest lyric poetry of the 20th century'
    Anne Stevenson, The Sunday Times, September 14th 1986
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