Reading English at Warwick University, I understood that poetry inspires and moves but I did not immediately recognise it as prayerful. Yet a brief scan of the breviary reveals how the Daily Office is bookmarked with poetic gems from George Herbert, John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) would be a welcome female voice in that collection. She, too, versifies prayer and in her industrious output, publishing work almost continuously from 1953 until her death, poetry becomes an incarnational practice whereby “she repeatedly returns to the conjunction of the divine and the human…of the material and the spiritual, the mundane and the mysterious” (Barry Sloan, 2006). At over a thousand pages Jennings’s Collected Poems perhaps invites commitment as well as patience. I certainly see her poems as life-long companions, unfolding in meaning over time, and I share here some examples of the way her poetry, richly and complexly layered with her experiences as a Catholic, has accompanied me in priestly formation and, more broadly, Christian discipleship. Take, for instance, her poem addressed to a “Friend with a Religious Vocation”:
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The poetry of Elizabeth Jennings helped shape me as a Christian
Fr Ryan Service

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