SOURCE: “Ceremonial Forms,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4685, January 15, 1993, p. 23.

In the following review of Times and Seasons, Eaves discusses Jennings's use of time, form, and language.

Time is a continual, if not quite perpetual, worry for Elizabeth Jennings. At its crudest, it represents distance from God—a mechanical, clockwork intrusion into the Garden. At its best, as she refers to it in a poem from her collection, Extending the Territory (1985), it is an elemental art that “moves within / The discourse of the learned heart”. But while the second condition is clearly the one to which her poetry aspires, the combination of primal faith and “learned” love that is supposed to get her there makes for a God with a rather complicated set of responses to culture and the gods of unruly nature.

Concluding an Advent poem in the new collection’s Christmas sequence, she voices the conventional...