Elizabeth Jennings has been in my poetry life for more than forty years. I have always found her uniquely able to marry plain speaking and poetic elegance, intimacy and universality, tenderness and facing facts. Her humility is in the best sense proud. Like the American poet Edna St Vincent Millay whose conducting of a poem sometimes reminds me of her, Jennings’s crafting of a line can often be so indisputably fine as to feel as though she has turned it on a lathe. 

It isn’t often when reading a poet’s Collected Poems that one stops leafing through and resorts to single page-turning, but with Jennings it becomes irresistible. When I put together a course on Four Women Poets in 2019, Jennings occupied a distinct and complementary place alongside Szymborska, Adcock and Boland. For another course, in 2021, on Poetry and the Soul, which was responding to life under Covid, she kept indispensable company with George Herbert, R S Thomas and Mary Oliver. 

Jennings 100 will trace the unstoppable growth and flowering of this graceful and incisive poet and appreciate how much, like the best poets who have managed this, she is able to open up the life of the spirit on a plane which offers belief’s insight and enablement without any sense of constraint. In that sense hers is a discipline of possibility like Emily Dickinson’s.

These sessions are always focussed and informal. Everyone can feel free to express their thoughts and feelings about the poems as they want to. A lot of ground gets covered, poems and readers come alive, and friends are quickly made of the poets and each other. 

HANDOUT COPY FOR THE SESSION WILL BE SENT TO YOU IN ADVANCE TO PRINT AT HOME