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| Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) |
[...] She was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1926. She had a troubled childhood. Her father was a physician, attentive and indulgent to his talented, unpredictable daughter. She attempted suicide more than once. Unlike Sylvia Plath, whom she admired, and Anne Sexton, whom she didn't, she refused to dwell on the causes of her illness. Poetry was not exorcism but communion. However dire her situation, poetry provided a way back from the edge, not a peek over it. When the vogue for confessionalism was at its height, she was described as an English confessional poet, a distracting misnomer.
Her second book, A Sense of the World (1958), received a Somerset Maugham Award. She travelled to Italy, a formative experiences and one of her happiest times. There she wrote her favourite among her poems, 'Fountains'. [...]
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| from the Carcanet archives: Jennings, c. 1955 |
She insists on continuities in the language of poetry. 'Poets work upon and through each other,' she says. The inevitable interdependence between poets and poems is 'the real meaning of tradition and influence'. Transcendence is not an aesthetic but a spiritual verity. The connection between Herbert, Traherne and Vaughan is more than literary: it entails affinities not only of temperament but also of spirit. Her own connection with Eliot and Hopkins, with Edwin Muir and Rilke, is as patent as her loving inferences from Saint Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich.
She looks for a language of embodiment, that contains rather than describes meanings: 'With this ring I thee wed', not 'I give you this ring as a symbol of our marriage'. Enactment in language – a function of rhythm, word-order, diction – can impart a spiritual dimension to work of secular writers; poems can mean more than a poet intends, as if touched by a grace the poet inadvertently accesses and cannot deny. For a religious poet, crisis comes when grace recedes, as it does from Vaughan and Cowper, St John of the Cross and Hart Crane, and from Jennings herself: the anxiety of disconnection is potent and can be fatal. […]
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| The Collected Poems, available in paperback and ebook |
[When I became her publisher,] I was prepared for the sacks of A4 notebooks she submitted so I could make a selection and running order. This ritual was repeated for several of her later books which needed, for the most part, to be typed up from manuscripts. She had a habit of writing in large spiral-bound notebooks propped on her knee, filling them with verse from back to front. Apart from the occasional 'dry period', she wrote copiously and revised little.
She compared making poems to the practice of prayer, which reconciles an individual with the world outside. Self is subsumed in a larger stability.
Each brings an island in his heart to square
With what he finds, and all is something strange
And most expected.
Prayer and poetry also risk the terrifying world of shadows. In a poem on Rembrandt's late self-portraits she implicates herself: 'To paint's to breathe / And all the darknesses are dared.' It was intensely exciting for me when a fine poem managed to burst free of the undergrowth of difficult handwriting and repetitive tropes (seasons, sleeplessness, remote love) to dazzle eye and ear. […]
Each brings an island in his heart to square
With what he finds, and all is something strange
And most expected.
Prayer and poetry also risk the terrifying world of shadows. In a poem on Rembrandt's late self-portraits she implicates herself: 'To paint's to breathe / And all the darknesses are dared.' It was intensely exciting for me when a fine poem managed to burst free of the undergrowth of difficult handwriting and repetitive tropes (seasons, sleeplessness, remote love) to dazzle eye and ear. […]
None of her poems is without at least a moment of astonishment, but few are as complete as 'My Grandmother;' and 'Song for a Birth or a Death' from her middle books. Though she wrote discrete lyrics, she is a poet who, like another Catholic writer, David Jones, makes most sense in extenso: the predictable and pedestrian exist beside the epiphanic.
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| Michael Schmidt |
From Michael Schmidt's obituary of Elizabeth Jennings, published in the Independent on 1st October 2001.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
Every week on the blog, we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors. The book(s) on offer will change each week, so watch this space!
This week, it's The Collected Poems by Elizabeth Jennings. Just go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive).