Publisher's Synopsis
Familiar Spirits is included in Elizabeth Jennings' New Collected Poems
The Familiar Spirits of Elizabeth Jennings's new collection of poems are those of the changing seasons, the good and the unsettling ghosts of the past, and the gracious familiars who console and instruct. There are parents, but also a beloved sister whose life has run its different course parallel to the poet's, and through whom she can infer a different world. This book revisits childhood and finds forgotten voices, discovering devotion, and giving as generously as Jennings always does a candid, reciprocal grace. The world of urban violence persists nearby, and she dwells with fascination on aspects of love which can grow, fray and snap, and those which survive in an age of troubled values.
Familiar Spirits includes sonnets, lyrical poems, and writing which, as so often in Jennings, experiments with longer cadences and with a free verse indebted to William Carlos Williams. But her characteristic eloquence is formal, metrical, taut, the stanzas handled never mechanically but with subtlety and bending, occasionally makeshift, occasionally broken, by the pressure of feeling.
