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     Elizabeth Jennings turned 70 last year. In the Meantime, her latest collection, addresses the themes that have captivated her throughout her long and distinguished career: childhood, friendship, nature, travel, and religion. Here she concentrates on another of her continuous subjects, time, particularly in relation to a word that occurs repeatedly in her poetry, lack. These are poems about loss. Above all, they explore relations to time: the lost time of our lives, especially childhood; time and love; time and faith. In this collection Jennings’s poetry deepens into masterful meditations about the escape into timelessness through belief and appreciation of God’s creations.

     While the collection is not formally divided into sections, the poems are grouped around four major topics. The first part, focusing on the contrast between youth and age, contains the weakest poems in the book. In the past, Jennings has displayed a tendency towards sentimentality and statement-making. This is evident in some of the poems looking back on childhood, especially ‘Wisdom of the Fields’, in which the speaker compares the summers of her youth in North Oxford with modern children’s holidays abroad:

Most likely they’re in Greece or Tenerife,
Names we had never heard of but I swear
We learnt a wisdom in our playing life
That can’t be found on hot sand anywhere.

Other poems such as ‘Among Late-Teenagers’ start with well-managed description but fall flat by the end; the latter half of ‘Prawning’ is marred by prosaic lines such as “Except that such a craft enjoyed with children/ Is precious always” and of the prawns: “We had no qualms/ About their deaths. In Nature’s hierarchies/ They fitted in a happy part of childhood”. Unusually for a poet who handles technique adroitly in numerous forms, in some of these poems Jennings stresses the passive to the point of stiffness, as in “Smells/ Inside these Summer igloos were of wood/ And something very old we had no name for”, “Quick fear/ Is present that she may/ Fall or be frightened”. However, many of the poems in this first section are vivid. Compare ‘A House in Nottingham’, with its sermonising about a child with Down’s Syndrome with the unflinching ‘For Charlotte’, which contemplates how the speaker (and the reader) can learn from her.

     Jennings has written many poems on art before, including tributes to painters and reflections on the nature of art. ‘Order’ recalls an earlier poem about landscapes, yet this poem expresses man’s urge to create patterns after the loss of Eden, especially in gardens: “We lost liberty/ Of one kind but we’ve fashioned others”. Other poems in this second section build on the relationship between faith and art, explore the convictions and aspirations holy men and artists share, and celebrate how art helps us reach faith and strengthens understanding of divine concepts. In the third section Jennings looks at the interplay of time and love. ‘Having it Both Ways’ states how we are free from time when out of love and yet we wish for “cruel enchantments” to rule us once more. ‘Loss of Loss’ mourns the passing of grief after the death of a loved one. ‘Touch’ is lovely in its consideration of how touch is an essential element of sacrament and love; ‘Telling the Time’ shows how time has power over love, is its enemy, and stalks liberty.

     The fourth section consists of moving poems about the suspension of time that takes place during the Mass and the sharing of God. Jennings ponders the host and the God hidden in it, the God hidden in man, and the godliness hidden in man. Here, in the poems centred on Holy Week there is the victory over time and death in Christ’s resurrection, Lazarus’s rising from the grave (“a little Christ”) and Mary’s Assumption. The poems are ardently written portraits of faith in the modern world and the tension between spirit and flesh. Jennings makes one feel the beauty of belief and her joy in the escape from the everyday world her faith gives her; as she writes in ‘A Touch of Existentialism’:

A passion
Teaches us ecstasy and how to pause
Within our central place in all creation.

They augment the directness, clarity, and depth of emotion shown in Jennings’s earlier collections. They, like the best of the poems in the preceding sections of In the Meantime, cause us to look up from our mortality and see the beauty in the world around us; they teach us how to praise. In a 1972 essay Margaret Byers wrote that Jennings’s poetry “Continues with the preoccupations of the earlier (work), but moves always closer and closer to bedrock... To have kept course and cut always deeper as she went and goes is a remarkable achievement.” Twenty-five years on from that essay, Jennings continues her advancement and her extraordinary accomplishment.