Having published since the early 1950s some twenty books of verse (including two substantial collections), together with several anthologies and critical works, Elizabeth Jennings is a well-known writer on both sides of the Atlantic. Her poetic voice--which sounds also in her prose work--is unmistakable: quiet, controlled but not tight, always thoughtful but never ideological. Her admirers must assent to Wordsworth's dictum that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the aid of gross and violent stimulants." From there they go on to discover in her a poet of more variety than sameness, more experiment than consolidation: in her many short poems there are many small surprises. She has a wider curiosity than Henry Vaughan, a greater range of feeling than Christina Rossetti, is more delicate than Robert Frost, and less prosy than Edwin Muir. They of course surpass her in their own ways, but it is...