The characteristics of [Elizabeth Jennings's] poetry, from her first remarkable Fantasy Press volume 14 years ago, have been ingenuity, wit, and a persistent interest in the relationship between visible and imagined worlds. The tone is often lyrical, but the poems [in her Collected Poems] are metaphysical conceits. Some are about love, all are basically involved with the nature of reality. Can we really trust what we see?…

These are Miss Jennings's poetic concerns [in Collected Poems], and she carried them through from the first with intelligence and a powerful sense of form. It is a pleasure to see poems that are organised, like those of Graves or Housman, that start from an evident point, move to a designed coherent end, and are written in a language that is always clean and clear. As a stylist she sprang ready-armed with her first book and has developed little, but her subjects...