SOURCE: Review of The Animals’ Arrival, in Poetry, Vol. CXVIII, No. 2, May, 1971, pp. 110-11.

In the following review, Mott contends that Jennings exhibits power and bravery in her work.

Elizabeth Jennings has been accused at times of quietness, if not tameness, but it would be grossly unfair to accuse the poet of The Animals’ Arrival of any such thing. Like Abse’s recent poems, if these are not shrill, they are bravely concerned with harrowing experience and a still more harrowing vision of it:

My inward needs and fears still stir and grow Into a hideous and nightmare form. 

“Hospital Garden”

Seeing disorder within and without, Elizabeth Jennings seeks courageously for order. In such poems as “A Pattern”, she achieves it at least in the high standard of her own art. But where order is not to be had outside her poetry she admits it. A child can...