In the Meantime

by Jennings, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9781857542561
• ISBN10: 1857542568
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-02-01
• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.

Summary

Elizabeth Jennings turned seventy the year this was published. This book of poems is graced by a firm wisdom and achieves moments of religious and individual serenity. In the Meantime strives to come to terms with losses, with failure, loves,
and most of all with time. It celebrates, too, the ways of nature, and her sorrow and anger for the suffering of others is informed by her own experience, her own loves.
    
Her previous book, Familiar Spirits, was concerned with memory; here her eyes are on the present and the future, and memory touches her as potentiality. In the Meantime includes sonnets, lyrics, and experiments with free verse, the stanzas always shaped by a pressure of feeling.

Table of Contents

The Right Givers	9	(10)
Prawning	10	(2)
Wisdom of the Fields	12	(1)
Spring Love	13	(1)
The Liberation	14	(1)
Dream	15	(1)
Their First Snow	16	(1)
A House in Nottingham	17	(1)
For Charlotte	18	(1)
Children in Summer	19	(1)
Child of Eleven Questions	20	(1)
The Need to Praise	21	(1)
Oxford, Heatwave, Tourists	22	(1)
Somerset	23	(1)
Among Late-Teenagers	24	(1)
Welcoming Spring	25	(1)
The Great Spirits	26	(1)
Story Tellers	27	(1)
Seers and Makers	28	(1)
Hermits and Poets	29	(1)
The Sitter	30	(1)
Act of the Imagination	31	(1)
For Paul Klee	32	(1)
Order	33	(1)
Sonnets to Narcissus	34	(3)
Having it Both Ways	37	(1)
Touch	38	(1)
Telling the Time	39	(1)
Two Sonnets	40	(2)
A World of Love	42	(1)
Loss of Loss	43	(1)
At Mass (I)	44	(2)
Which is Which?	46	(1)
After Dark	47	(1)
At Mass (II)	48	(2)
Bread	50	(1)
Consecration (I)	51	(1)
Consecration (II)	52	(1)
Ash Wednesday 1995	53	(1)
A Touch of Existentialism	54	(1)
Holy Communion	55	(1)
The Spirit's Power	56	(1)
Rome	57	(2)
Time's Element	59	(1)
Calvary	60	(1)
The Assumption of Our Lady	61	(1)
Flesh and Spirit	62	(1)
Spirit and Flesh	63	(1)
Lazarus	64	(1)
Good Friday	65	(1)
Age of Doubt	66	(1)
With the Migrants	67	(1)
In the Meantime	68