In Consequently I Rejoice, a substantial collection of eighty-eight poems, experiences are ordered with that meticulous precision we have grown to expect, and the whole book is marshalled impeccably so as to lead us from the preliminary night-thoughts, stirrings of creative activity, through a cycle of the year, dominated by bird-flight and bird-song, to a world of men and women: the old, who have attained wisdom or declined from it. Conscious of the timeless equation of bird and soul, we pass to a sequence of meditations on the Christian faith, some cast in the form of dramatic monologues by Christ and Mary, and so to a group of poems whose theme is the relationship between the artist and his achievement.

Elizabeth Jennings's world is lucid, topiaried. When she moves deeply inside herself, the poems have that edgy feeling of the convalescent for whom the small event bears a...