SOURCE: Review of Extending the Territory, in New Statesman, Vol. 110, No. 2851, November 15, 1985, p. 28.

In the review below, Lucas finds fault with Extending the Territory, arguing that the poetry is vapid, the language unvaried, and the subject matter uninteresting.

With Elizabeth Jennings’s Extending the Territory we are, I fear, back with the kinds of experiences which ask to be taken on trust. ‘But six years of my childhood are precise’, she says in ‘An Absolute’, and goes on: ‘I see the berries // On bushes as imperial as music, / Poised as poetry’. She may be able to, but I’m darnned if I can. Nor can I summon up much interest in ‘The Circuses’ where downs are said to be ‘energetic’ and horses ‘sprightly’. And the ‘untarnished marvel’ of ‘A Sky in Childhood’ doesn’t do a great deal for me, either.

When she gets beyond the world of...