Women's poetry has become an industry since Elizabeth Jennings began to publish in the 1950s. It is to Miss Jennings's credit that she has not allowed herself to be swept along with the tide. In her new collection, Growing Points, the poise and tenderness of her early work is reaffirmed. She is still too nice to stand up and spit at life—a gesture not incompatible with the reverence she obviously feels for it—but in some of these poems she shows us that she probably could if she would.

             I feel I could be turned to ice
             If this goes on, if this goes on.
             I feel I could be buried twice
             And still the death not yet be
                             done.

If only there were a few more poems like this in the book; but too often, 'literature' takes over…. Miss Jennings is a better religious poet. The...