Elizabeth Jennings
 

Dana Gioia has a fantastic essay in 'First Things' about the mightily neglected Elizabeth Jennings. It is such an interesting subject written about with such impressive clarity that I thought others here might enjoy it, too.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/...f-the-galaxies

After reading a A.E. Stallings tweet, I picked up a Selected of Jennings (1979). It was either that or the enormous Collected (2012). Gioia strikes me as dead right when he writes that "Her reputation would be larger had she published less" and "There is an urgent need for a new selected volume of her verse." Probably of roughly the same length of the old one. Lots of good stuff, but still some mediocre in the 1979.

The best stuff ranks up there with the best Movement poems, though.

A big YES from me on the bits you've quoted, Andrew. Also, a quick google showed a biography due later this year, the first on Jennings I'm aware of?? I could be wrong.

Thanks for this, Dink. I enjoyed the article immensely. Looking forward to reading more EJ.

I could feel you reading it beside me as I read it, Mems!! Uncanny . . .

I felt that too!!!!! I was thinking, yes, Dink is thinking of me about this and that, and I'm thinking of her about this and that.

HA!

Soul siblings.

Yes, thanks for this, Cally. I’ve been nudged into discovering EJ for myself.

It’s a thoughtful piece, and it jostled two apples from my tree, possibly worth nibbling: i) George Eliot’s wonderful opening of Middlemarch, and how certain feelings and yearnings played out in the character of Dorothea, another woman of intelligence and passion caught in a ‘secular age’; and ii) the other Eliot’s spirituality: I recently re-read Four Quartets, and while (as always) I found much to appreciate, I’ve always had the feeling that Possum, to some degree, had the meaning but missed the experience, to invert his well-known line. I find myself softening on him with the years, but I do think there’s something to that intuition. ‘Too analytical and self-conscious’, Gioia writes, and I think I agree wrt Possum – I’d say it’s the intellect whelming the emotions, even supplanting them. Though perhaps that's unfair, and it's to suggest a problem of agency and responsibility where none exists. A discussion for another day...

Anyway, I look forward to reading some EJ!

Elizabeth Jennings
Absence

I visited the place where we last met.
Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,
The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;
There was no sign that anything had ended
And nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out from the trees,
Singing an ecstasy I could not share,
Played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these
Pleasures there could not be a pain to bear
Or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same
That made your absence seem a savage force,
For under all the gentleness there came
An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass
Were shaken by my thinking of your name.

Hi Andrew,

I think you have a typo here. "The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees," says google. And it seems to need a preterite.
The name at the end seems a bit weighty, so I am going to read that as G-d.

Cheers,
John