SOURCE: Review of A Sense of the World, in Encounter, Vol. XII, No. 2, February, 1959, p. 74.

In the review below, Heath-Stubbs argues that Jennings is not disciplined enough in her writing and produces work with a flat, muted tone.

Miss Jennings’s work has received so much praise from those whose judgment one must respect, that one hesitates to dissent. One recognises the sensibility and the intelligence, but there is a curiously muted quality about her poetry. It is as if one was listening to someone murmuring to themselves in their sleep. Granted that this is, in Mr. Eliot’s phrase, essentially poetry overheard rather than heard, yet one longs for her to wake up and speak out. Her technique does not seem to help. Her rhythms are generally flatly iambic, and blank verse or rather unambitious stanza forms predominate. This leads her, too often, into a weak, meandering...