Collected Poems

Jennings Elizabeth

"The Collected Poems" is a new and definitive edition of the poetry of one of the best-loved and most enduringly popular modern poets.

Almost all of Jennings' published poetry (including work never before collected) and a large selection of her unpublished poems are included here, together with resources detailing her poetry, prose, essays, plays and correspondence. An afterword draws on her unpublished autobiography "As I Am" and her unpublished theological prose to illuminate the religious faith at the heart of her poetry. Two previously unseen photographs of Jennings and reproductions of two of her little-known "picture poems" complete the volume.

Emma Mason, Reader at the University of Warwick who has written extensively on religion and poetry, suggests that Jennings' achievement is "her ability to translate the intensity and happiness of her Christian faith into a canon of accessible poems that reach out to a community of readers". "The Collected Poems" enables Jennings' poetry to speak to a new community of readers.

About the Author

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 career in copy-editing in London. Returning to Oxford to take up a full-time post as a librarian at the city library, Jennings worked briefly at Chatto and Windus before becoming a full-time poet. Her second volume of poetry, "A Way of Looking" (1955), won the Somerset Maugham Award, which allowed her to travel to Rome, a city which had an immense impact on her poetry and Roman Catholic faith. While she suffered from physical and mental ill health from her early thirties, Jennings was a popular and widely read poet. She received the W. H. Smith award in 1987 for "Collected Poems 1953-1985", and in 1992 was awarded a CBE. She died in Rosebank Care Home, Bampton, in 2001 and is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.

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