Song for a Birth or a Death and Other Poems

First edition. Slim 8vo. 63 pp. Maroon cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket design by Francis Minns [10s. 6d. net to front flap]. Poetry Book Society Summer Choice with Bulletin No. 29, dated July 1961, bearing author's comments, tipped in. Light offsetting to endpapers, else Fine.

Author's third book of poetry, all preceded by a 1953 Fantasy Press pamphlet simply titled Poems. Regarded as a traditionalist rather than an innovator, Jennings is best known for her lyric poetry and mastery of form. Her work displays a simplicity of metre and rhyme shared with Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn, all members of the group of English poets known as 'The Movement'.

Prolific beyond the norm, Jennings wrote quickly, revised little, and claimed that her poems "came out very clean." Her Collected Poems, issued by Carcanet in 2012, add up to an impressive 1,100 pages. Anointed "the bag lady of the sonnets" by the British tabloids on the occasion of the bestowment of the CBE by the Queen in 1992 – an honour she collected in her plimsolls – Jennings now ranks among the finest British poets of the second half of the twentieth century.