Elizabeth Jennings turned seventy the year this was published. This book of poems is graced by a firm wisdom and achieves moments of religious and individual serenity. "In the Meantime" strives to come to terms with losses, with failure, loves, and most of all with time. It celebrates, too, the ways of nature, and her sorrow and anger for the suffering of others is informed by her own experience, her own loves. Her previous book, "Familiar Spirits," was concerned with memory; here her eyes are on the present and the future, and memory touches her as potentiality. In the Meantime includes sonnets, lyrics, and experiments with free verse, the stanzas always shaped by a pressure of feeling.

Elizabeth Jennings, born in Lincolnshire in 1926, has spent most of her life in Oxford. Her first book won a Somerset Maugham Award, and many distinctions followed, among them the W.H. Smith Award (1987) and a C.B.E. Over the last twenty years Carcanet has published many of her books including Selected Poems, Collected Poems, Tributes, Times and Seasons, Familiar Spirits, In the Meantime, Praises, her translations of Michelangelo's Sonnets, her critical meditation Every Changing Shape and her anthology A Poet's Choice.