SOURCE: Review of Praises, in The Times Liteary Supplement, No. 4995, December 25, 1998, pp. 28-9.

In the following review, O'Neill argues that although there is a repetitive quality to Jennings'’s work, her writing deserves praise.

At one stage in Praises, Elizabeth Jennings asserts, “Stars are a bright simplicity”, reaffirming her affinity with Henry Vaughan for whom “Stars are of mighty use”. The points of likeness and difference between the twentieth-century Catholic poet and the Metaphysical mystic are fascinating. Like Vaughan, Jennings values intimations of “An unfallen world”. Unlike him, she is “not after visions or prayers”. Like him, she places emphasis on childhood. Unlike him, she finds in childhood a forecaste of adult suffering. Like him, she has become an elegist, entitling the collection’s opening poem “For my Sister, now a Widow”. Unlike him, her elegy is this-worldly in its recollections of “The way he washed up the...