SOURCE: Review of Collected Poems, in Poetry, Vol. CL, No. 2, May, 1987, pp. 106-09.

In the review below, Gilbert argues that while Jennings's culture is foreign to Americans, her work is of great merit and importance.

Though she not only thinks about the significance of history but, as one of Britain’s more important recent poets, she has a significant personal and literary history, Elizabeth Jennings hardly seems to inhabit the same language, much less the same world, as the one in which Caroline Finkelstein and Lynda Hull dwell. Indeed, the Atlantic that divides the lives and works of these writers seems not only miles but centuries wide, a gulf in time as well as a gap in space. Beautifully—even, as I shall suggest, too “beautifully”—articulated, conceived in a mode of high formalism, Jennings’s poems appear at first to be artifacts of a culture so distanced...