SOURCE: Review of Collected Poems, in New Statesman, Vol. 114, No. 2943, August 21, 1987, p. 22.

In the following review, Sheppard compares Jennings's career with fellow Movement members, contending that her work exudes greater seriousness and mysticism.

The poetry of the Movement orthodoxy won’t go away: Larkin’s death clearly wasn’t the end of it. Indeed, in some of these recent books, Larkin is an excuse for pious, elegaic production by some of his followers. They mourn him, rightly, as a more consummate poet. ‘I do not want him to be dead!’ pleads Vernon Scannell, as if the whole thing might not function without Larkin. But, obviously, it does.

As one might expect, these poets broadly share a faith in a poetry of anecdote and measured tone, in which irony is used to both project and shield a reserved self. There is an ambivalent respect for traditional form: Anthony Thwaite...