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Every Changing Shape

Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems

Elizabeth Jennings

Every Changing Shape
10% off eBook (EPUB)
10% off Paperback
Categories: 20th Century, Christianity, Women
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847775900
£14.95 £13.45
Paperback (240 pages)
(Pub. Aug 1996)
9781857542479
£20.00 £18.00
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  • Description
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  • Do they move with empty minds so that
    Meditation may have room enough?
    Or are they filled with this world's appetites
    Which must be cleared out by a perfect love?

    Imagination shaping poems can seem
    The purest moments of one's life and yet
    We know, when coming from that trance, a dream
    Was working in us and the poem is set

    Down and finished, such experience
    May seem at times like a perfect meditation
    But words or images are what enchants,
    What seemed like prayer was only concentration

    from 'Hermits and Poets', In the Meantime

    Every Changing Shape, published in 1961 and now in paperback for the first time, considers from a Christian poet's perspective how religious or mystical experience informs the imagination. Elizabeth Jennings wrote the book early in her career; it continues to provide crucial readings of her chosen authors and clues to her own poetry.

    She avoids terms like 'inspiration', 'ecstasy', sticking to particulars - words, meanings - rather than ideology or theory. A collection of studies of writers and mystics past and present, it brings literary judgement to bear on a subject neglected in a secular age. Though her first concern is poetry, she draws on prose writers to effect her penetrating explorations.
    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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