It's good to see a poet breaking back out of a lean period. Elizabeth Jennings, one remembers, was brought in as the 'sensitive' dimension to the no-nonsense Movement of the Fifties. Her early poems were precise, beautifully rounded and very personal broodings on topics which her immediate contemporaries refused to have truck with: love, childhood, religion, travels in southern places. Her work was never less than accomplished, and could be memorable in its quiet, unstrained way. But subsequent books tended to be only as interesting as the new things she had to say, and these were few. And new ways of saying them were fewer still. Now, just when she seemed set to take a minor, if very respectable, place as a gentle mid-century romantic and modest allegorist, Growing Points shows us a poet who has suddenly and impressively increased the scope and richness, and the technical variety...