In “The Animals’ Arrival,” Jennings uses the flexible form of free verse to visualize the beginning of a new phase in human civilization; in “Never to See,” she uses the strict form of terza rima to imagine the beginning of old age, a new phase in human life. Her lasting concern with human being’s capacity to foresee freshly is here expressed in her nostalgic longing for the freshness and wonder of childhood perception. She evokes a sense of the child’s heightened consciousness, and of the adult’s yearning for the intense delight in the natural world: “that any moment childhood could allow”: “Never to see the spring and smell …show more content…
But they had not ripped upon any screens to reveal the rawness of ideas and experiences. The fact that she could write about the hospital experiences the same way she wrote about the Italian scenes or the animals’ arrival, shows the poetic strength in Jennings, rather than pointing to a weakness. The flexibility of language adjusts itself to the theme; between the themes and language .She is in constant search of artistic balance.
This book is dedicated to Peter Levi, but her concerns here are less personal and more aesthetic. In “Of Languages” she demands a new poetic, believing that the hour is nearing when language must be made sudden and new and images sharp and still. A call for honesty also appears in “Reslove” where she vows not to write so glibly by the ill, choosing instead warmth, sanity and health. But on the whole, the poems are not especially