"You have not worked the silences." -Marina
Excerpt:
I missed the birthday this week of the English poet Elizabeth Jennings. She was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, on July 18, 1926, and died Oct. 26, 2001, in Bampton, Oxfordshire. She’s buried in Wolvercote Cemetery alongside Isaiah Berlin, J.R.R. Tolkien and James Murray, founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I sense her work has never been well-known in the U.S. and is mostly forgotten in the U.K. Though a woman, her demographics have never been fashionable. She was a serious Roman Catholic, not an academic, an elastic formalist and never conspicuously political. She was also popular, by poetry market standards. Her Selected and Collected volumes of 1979 and 1986, respectively, sold more than 86,000 copies. When Nicholas Lezard reviewed her hefty Collected Poems last year, he called her work “accessible without being shallow,” as though such a distinction were necessary. She takes her rightful place among the most gifted of her English contemporaries – Smith, Enright, Larkin, Sisson, Gunn and Hill......
The very light is eagerly at play
And there are silences for me and you.
Elizabeth Jennings … accessible without being shallow. Photograph: Carcanet Press [Guardian UK]
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