Though she not only thinks about the significance of history but, as one of Britain’s more important recent poets, she has a significant personal and literary history, Elizabeth Jennings hardly seems to inhabit the same language, much less the same world, as the one in which Caroline Finkelstein and Lynda Hull dwell. Indeed, the Atlantic that divides the lives and works of these writers seems not only miles but centuries wide, a gulf in time as well as a gap in space. Beautifully—even, as I shall suggest, too “beautifully”—articulated, conceived in a mode of high formalism, Jennings’s poems appear at first to be artifacts of a culture so distanced from the varieties of American minimalism that it is difficult to imagine her as our contemporary. And, drawing on powerful monuments of unaging intellect, deploying Yeatsian lines and metaphysical references, citing Traherne, elegizing Auden, and translating Michelangelo, Jennings herself seems like a sort of theatrical relic, an exemplar of what history means as well as an interpreter of its meanings.

Nevertheless, history is not just what Jennings incarnates; it is also her theme: personal history, literary history, Christian history. Her collection opens with a preface in which she declares that “Art is not self-expression while, for me, ‘confessional poetry’ is almost a contradiction in terms.” Yet many of her works use the strategies of what we have lately called the “confessional” in order, as the Catholic church would have it, to explore the (implicitly public) moral implications of private experience. “Family Affairs,” she points out in one poem, “can sever veins,” and in another piece called “My Grandmother,” she describes an antique shop that her grandmother kept, “—or it kept her,” admitting that “when she died I felt no grief at all, / Only the guilt of what I once refused”: the history of the antique shop, the antique history of the family.

Similarly, Jennings writes poems which recount her experiences in a mental institution and then, both through overt and covert allusion, contextualize such experiences in simultaneously metaphysical and modernist cadences. Her best poems, however—and those which, to my mind, most fully engage with literary and, in a sense, political history—are religious pieces in a half (T. S.) Eliotian, half (Christina) Rossetti-esque mode. On this continent, right now, we rarely see such work, a point that is in itself historically fascinating. For this reason, perhaps, it is in a curious way heartening to think that someone can still write, as Jennings did in “A Christmas Suite in Five Movements” (1980), a litany that both echoes and transcends the famous “Lady of silences / calm and distressed” passage of “Ash Wednesday”:

Girl of the fountains, come into our desert.
Mary of broken hearts, help us to keep
Promises. Lady of wakefulness, take our sleep.
You hold God in your arms and he may weep.

For Jennings, in fact, it is as urgent as it was for Christina Rossetti—or, in different ways, for T. S. Eliot and, more skeptically, Emily Dickinson—to clarify her relationship to theological origins. Indeed, in a poem entitled “Clarify,” she prays for a solution that would illuminate the future by releasing her from the guilt of the past. I quote the poem in its entirety:

Clarify me, please,
God of the galaxies,
Make me a meteor,
Or else a metaphor
So lively that it grows
Beyond its likeness and
Stands on its own, a land
That nobody can lose.
God, give me liberty
But not so much that I
See you on Calvary
Nailed to the wood by me.

When I consider that this text was first collected in 1985, I am myself bemused by the vagaries of literary and intellectual history. And charmed by them. The Rossetti-esque intensity of Jennings’s faith, or desire for faith, is not something I would wish to lose in the bleakly existential world over which Finkelstein’s and Hull’s “tide of voices” incoherently washes.

Yet there is, of course, something deeply alien to us, at least to us in the United States, about Jennings’s beautifully formed and formulated phrases. I don’t think we believe in most of them, much as we’d like to, and therefore I don’t think we trust a lot of what she has to say. In an early poem, “Answers” (1955), she intuits “all the great conclusions coming near,” and thirty years later, in “A Class-Room,” she remembers experiencing a “high call” that is no longer available to many of us, certainly not to modest, somewhat muddled writers like Finkelstein and Hull, and she casts her memory in diction that seems as excessively high-flown as the idea of a “high call”:

… from a battle I learnt this healing peace,
Language a spell over the hungry dreams,
A password and a key. That day is still
Locked in my mind. When poetry is spoken
That door is opened and the light is shed,
The gold of language tongued and minted fresh.

At the same time, however, Jennings is a woman who can write a really glowing line like “Leaves fall / As if they meant to rise.” Her notion of history, with its oddly anachronistic evocations of a nineteenth-century Christian teleology, may not be ours, yet it is surely one to which we ought to attend, if only because its complex attention to enduring desires and ancient difficulties is so compelling.