Elizabeth Jennings, who died in 2001 was ‘the most unconditionally loved poet of (her) generation,’ according to Michael Schmidt writing in the preface to her New Collected Poems’ This seems a slightly less generous accolade when Schmidt goes on to say that the other poets of her generation included Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, not themselves obviously loveable poets. One imagines that Larkin might have been rather disappointed to have discovered, posthumously, that he was unconditionally loved, whereas Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry seems to invite just this response. Indeed, so different is the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings to that of Amis and Larkin it is hard to imagine how she can ever have been seriously associated with them in the minds of critics. Whether The Movement ever existed at all has been much debated, but the mature Elizabeth Jennings that we find in New Collected Poems shows what a different trajectory she had followed from that of her laconic and wry contemporaries.

New Collected Poems begins, like her Collected Poems and Selected Poems with a dozen poems from her first collected volume of poetry (entitled tentatively Poems). First and second are ‘Delay’ and ‘Winter Love’ which seem to set the tone of everything which comes after. They are short poems — the first consisting of two quatrains, the second of a sestet, almost two halves of a divided sonnet — which address two recurrent themes of Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry: love and time, more particularly the way in which the test of love is the test of time.