Elizabeth Jennings Critical Essay | Critical Essay by P. N. Furbank

Critical Essay by P. N. Furbank

The good things about Elizabeth Jennings are as good as ever in [Recoveries], and the limitations just the same. When a poem of hers comes off, she manages to cancel the impression made by those fluent, limp, iambic lines by some line (often a last one) which, equally fluent and rhythmically unexciting, concentrates the whole meaning of the poem, hits the bull's-eye in fact. The measured stillness sometimes comes out just as dullness, but much more often it is rescued in this way. Her best and natural state is contemplation, and the poems tend to be about the debits and credits of the contemplative attitude…. By a fine and conscious stroke of art Elizabeth Jennings places in the middle of her own grey and cloistral verses a translation from Camus, ecstatically hymning an Algerian morning, which has, in that context, the effect of blazing sun through cloister arcades.

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