Saturday, May 07, 2016

Well worth getting to know …

… A Faithful Poet | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



In the mid-1960s, Jennings began to suffer bouts of mental illness. In one of her unpublished poems, she writes of a stint in the hat factory: ‘Rest, rest,’ they cry / You might as well say ‘rest’ to a grasshopper. Her poems dealing with sickness and hospitals are some of her best. Unlike Sylvia Plath, she never mined illness for sensational effect; instead, illness called forth a kind of tender detachment from her, an attentive objectivity.

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