Overview
Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) is one of the twentieth century's best-loved and bestselling poets. As the author and editor of almost fifty books of poetry, criticism, and theology, she received numerous awards during her lifetime, including the W.H. Smith Prize for her 1986 Collected Poems, which went on to sell more than 50,000 copies. In 1992 was appointed CBE for services to literature. Carcanet first published her work in 1975. This New Selected Poems comes forty years on from her first Carcanet Selected, which it honours by retaining her original choices and adding poems from her several later collections. It marks the high points of a poetic career which spanned more than half a century and yielded some of the most moving and surprising poems of modern times. Edited by Rebecca Watts, whose debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Prize, this book is a new take on a poet whose human sympathy and religious faith are transferable and timeless.Author Biography
Elizabeth Jennings read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, but left to pursue a career in copy-editing in London. Returning to Oxford to take up a full-time post as a librarian at the city library, Jennings worked briefly at Chatto and Windus before becoming a fulltime poet. Her collection A Way of Looking (1955) won the Somerset Maugham Award. Rebecca Watts currently lives in Cambridge, where she works in a library and as a freelance editor. A selection of her poetry was included in New Poetries VI (2015). Her debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and featured in the Guardian and Financial Times "Best Books of 2016" lists.
