The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti claimed that "extreme turbulence" was best expressed with "extreme precision”. What time of human life appears more turbulent than that of adolescence?
Perhaps much modern strife can be explained by the deliberate colonisation of adulthood by adolescence.
We know little about the teenage years of Elizabeth Jennings, the most notable Catholic British poet since Gerard Manley-Hopkins, who was born in Lincolnshire on this day in 1926. Yet it is this time of life I illogically associate her with, given that I first happened upon her 1958 poem Absence, shortly after my own16th birthday. I had deliberately been seeking literary consolation.
