Elizabeth Jennings' poetry is replete with religious themes, experiences, aspirations, questions and speculations. Profoundly Christian yet alert to the ambiguities of human experience, immersed in the Catholic tradition but without unqualified surrender to dogmatic formulations, learned in incarnational theology and the astonishingly aware of the connectedness in Christian thought between the suffering of human beings and the passion of God.
Advent and Easter, year on year, provoked her to poetry, attempting again the impossible puzzle of arranging words so that eternal truth is sufficiently framed in language to embrace and communicate the realities to which language refers. Yet words we have, and limited though they are, words represent one of the great gifts of human exchange, and Babel nothwithstanding communication is a bedrock of culture, civilisation and human community.
So when Jennings writes a poem called 'Clarify', 12 brief lines making three short stanzas, she manages to make it a prayer for two great yearnings from our deepest being – the longing for meaning and the struggle for freedom, but meaning that is purposeful, and freedom that is not destructive. Lucid brevity, knowing naivete, self- knowledge
CLARIFY
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.
(New Collected Poems, 161)
Leave a Reply