Poet's Choice

Jennings Elizabeth

In "A Poet's Choice" Elizabeth Jennings includes the poems which helped shape her taste – poems she read at school, or discovered in bookshops and the library, or pored over as an undergraduate – work which first gave her a taste for the art of poetry and taught the formal and thematic skills she has practised for fifty years. Many of the poems chosen will be familiar to poetry lovers: what is exciting is the way she brings them together in a kind of commonplace book, conveying to a new audience the magic that enchanted her.

This anthology is a window on the personal culture of one of our best-loved writers.

"She is one of the few living poets we could not do without", Peter Levi said.

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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