Title: The Collected Poems

Author: Elizabeth Jennings; Emma Mason (ed.)

ISBN: 978 1 847770 68 4

Publisher: Carcanet Press

Price: £25 (RRP)

The Collected Poems is a new and definitive edition of the poetry of one of the best-loved and most enduringly popular modern poets.

Almost all of Jennings’ published poetry (including work never before collected) and a large selection of her unpublished poems are included here, together with resources detailing her poetry, prose, essays, plays and correspondence. An afterword draws on her unpublished autobiography As I Am and her unpublished theological prose to illuminate the religious faith at the heart of her poetry. Two previously unseen photographs of Jennings and reproductions of two of her little-known ‘picture poems’ complete the volume.

Emma Mason, Reader at the University of Warwick who has written extensively on religion and poetry, suggests that Jennings’ achievement is ‘her ability to translate the intensity and happiness of her Christian faith into a canon of accessible poems that reach out to a community of readers’. The Collected Poems enables Jennings’ poetry to speak to a new community of readers.

A review of the book from The Guardian is online here.