At one stage in Praises, Elizabeth Jennings asserts, “Stars are a bright simplicity”, reaffirming her affinity with Henry Vaughan for whom “Stars are of mighty use”. The points of likeness and difference between the twentieth-century Catholic poet and the Metaphysical mystic are fascinating. Like Vaughan, Jennings values intimations of “An unfallen world”. Unlike him, she is “not after visions or prayers”. Like him, she places emphasis on childhood. Unlike him, she finds in childhood a forecaste of adult suffering. Like him, she has become an elegist, entitling the collection’s opening poem “For my Sister, now a Widow”. Unlike him, her elegy is this-worldly in its recollections of “The way he washed up the breakfast, hoovered the floor”. Yet if the grave dazzle of “They are all gone into the world of light” lies beyond Jennings, it is the case that for her, as for Vaughan, “strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes”. She has a gift for making something unparaphrasably individual out of what may seem, initially, to work at the level of a proposition. In “Myths within Us”, she claims that “All the great myths that were whispered / Into our childhood ears / Stay with us somehow somewhere.” The poem persuades through the rhythmic skills that ensure Jennings’s poetry is close to song yet in touch with the flow of speech. Occasionally, her preference for a plain style gives her language a shopworn air, as when she writes “you know how to make magic happen”. But the next line, “It's here before me with the curtains open”, rides to the rescue, its disciplined music suggesting that “magic” is, indeed, possible. Praises treats interconnected subjects (the mysteries of religion, the significance of the apparently insignificant, the reality of transience and pain, the power of art), until the different poems seem to merge into a single, endlessly self-modifying work. This is not an adverse comment, even if there is a degree of repetition between poems. On the contrary, Elizabeth Jennings’s poetic inexhaustibility is a matter for gratitude—and praise.

Additional coverage of Jennings's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vol. 61-64; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 8, 39, 66; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 27; Major 20th-Century Writers, Vol. 1, and Something about the Author, Vol. 66.