Elizabeth Jennings certainly has ballast in the ranks of 20th-century poets and maintains a strongish claim on our attention in the 21st. She first made her name as the only woman among the “movement” poets – Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Donald Davie. They were fashionable in the 1950s, reflecting the spirit of the times with their reverence for the real not the romantic, and their restrained, comprehensible language.
Jennings would later insist that she was never part of their gang, and outlasted many of them as a poet in her own right, her collections appearing to acclaim, substantial sales and a procession of prizes right up until her death in 2001. She has left her mark on the canon, with a few enduringly popular, much anthologised works (some on the A-level syllabus) such as One Flesh, where a daughter looks at her elderly parents in their twin beds and wonders about the passion that once begat her.
Do they know they’re old,
These two who are my father and my mother
Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?
Jennings’s cradle Catholicism caused great damage to her emotional life, giving her a horror of sex
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