New Selected Poems

by Elizabeth Jennings, Rebecca Watts (Editor)

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.

Genres: Poetry

218 pages, Paperback

Published January 30, 2020

Reviews

[Iulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5*

I came to these poems knowing next to nothing about Elizabeth Jennings. I found tenderness, grief, doubt, existential fears, humility, deep love for nature - in short: much to enchant.

Favourites:

"Delay"
"Fishermen"
"The Roman Forum"
"The Shot"
"Song for a Birth or a Death"
"The Diamond Cutter"
"Sequence in Hospital"
"Chinese Art"
"The Animals' Arrival"
"Beech"
"Into the Hour"
"Thought and Feeling"
"The Way of Words and Language"
"Water Music"