A Sense of the World. Poems.

First edition. Slim 8vo. 69pp. Cream cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Jacket design by Francis Minns. Recommended by The Book Society.

Price-clipped. Previous ownership signature to flyleaf, a touch of soiling to lower panel of d/j, else Fine.

Author's second book of poetry, penned mostly on sabbatical in Italy, enabled by the proceeds of the Somerset Maugham Award given her by the Society of Authors for A Way of Looking (1955). It contains her favourite of her own poems, Fountain, which ends: "It is how we must have felt / Once at the edge of some perpetual stream, / Fearful of touching, bringing no thirst at all, / Panicked by no perception of ourselves / But drawing the water down to the deepest wonder". She later explained: "Art, for me, is that strength, that summoning fountain".

A prolific poet Jennings wrote quickly, revised little, and claimed that her poems "came out very clean." Her short, meditative lyrics, known for their simplicity, control, and range of feeling conveyed qualities that linked Jennings to a group of poets referred to as "The Movement", such as Amis, Gunn, and Larkin whose poetry reveals a shared love and acceptance of regular meter and rhyme.

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. Her Collected Poems, issued by Carcanet in 2012, add up to an impressive 1,100 pages.