One of my internet poetry explorings found me this last week,Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Jennings
and I'm not going to improve on it but it did prompt me to get out the old Selected Poems and I was pleased to find the 1992 Collected next to it. I was surprised to find that the excellent poem, Delay, quoted by Dana Gioia is the first in each volume. It's often significant, or at least of interest, to see where a selector or collector of a poet's poems thinks their selection should start. It's not always the poet's best work but usually the earliest item considered of sufficient worth. In the case of Delay, there isn't much better to follow but there are plenty that bring Jennings back to one's attention.
Having been associated with the loosely identified 'Movement' of the 1950's, she maintained her position only among a much smaller readership than Larkin's, when Thom Gunn and Donald Davie couldn't seriously be bracketed with The Movement as time went on and the others - Kingsley Amis, John Wain - now only look as if they were added in to make any sort of movement at all. Her poems have the clarity of diction, formality and lack of rhetoric that characterized this plain style but if her poems are carefully made they don't stretch the language too far and if they are profound and gentle they sometimes tell more than they show their meanings and require little interpretation. They are what they say they are.
But she was prolific, finding plenty to say about life, death, art and all the things in between without becoming repetitive. Having always admired her in a small way, returning to the Collected soon made me admire her the more, especially in the light of Dana's piece and the background detail included in it. Heaven knows it has taken me a lifetime to recover from the late 70's university education that taught us that there was only the text. Whether it be from biography, letters or a poet's other writing, and whether it be Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin or Hughes, notwithstanding Sylvia, surely the experience of any poet's work worth the reading is enhanced by some knowledge of time, place and circumstances.
I'm glad I found the Collected or else I'd have ordered it again but thankfully I found that there is a biography due in September, by Dana Greene, and so that provides something to look forward to. But the need to mark the moment by buying something led me to abebooks, wondering how much a signed Jennings might cost. Not that much. It's not often I add to the Signed Poetry Books collection these days - the likes of Eliot, Auden, Larkin and certainly Sylvia and Dylan being beyond my sensible budget- but a copy of Lucidities, of which not much gets collected in the Collected, has,
- signed letter from Jennings laid in. Not a signed poetry book at all, really, but an item of value to one who would value such things and if a piece of paper signed by Queen Elizabeth I was valued at £35k on Antiques Roadshow last night then a tenner for a book with such a letter seems fine to me.
I'm always glad to help restore a reputation that deserves restoration. Two years ago I wrote here with some enthusiasm about A Very British Scandal, the account of the Jeremy Thorpe trial. Look what I did for that.
