Collected Poems

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 Almost all of Jennings's published poetry (including work never before collected) and a large selection of her unpublished poems are included here, together with resources detailing her poetry, prose, essays, plays and correspondence. An afterword draws on her unpublished autobiography 'As I Am' and her unpublished theological prose to illuminate the religious faith at the heart of her poetry.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, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick, has written extensively on religion in English literature. Jennings achievement is, she writes, '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's poetry to speak to a new community of readers.

'[A] fine poet who ... manages to build the richest of poems from the barest of methods' - The Times, 14/12/75 'one of contemporary English poetry's major sublunary assets' - Will Eaves, the Times Literary Supplement, 15/01/93

Elizabeth Jennings was born in Lincolnshire in 1926 and spent most of her life in Oxford. Her first book won a Somerset Maugham Award, and many distinctions followed, among them the W.H. Smith Award (1987) and a C.B.E. Over the last twenty years Carcanet has published many of her books including Selected Poems, Collected Poems, Tributes, Times and Seasons, Familiar Spirits, In the Meantime, Praises, her translations of Michelangelo's Sonnets, her critical meditation Every Changing Shape and her anthology A Poet's Choice. She died in 2002.