A real place is built. The architects
Consider light and shade, the climate too.
Dreams are drawn down to possibilities
And men consider little human acts
And needs. The greatest cities always please
    But must be makeshift too.
from 'Cities: Their Beginning'

Familiar Spirits is included in Elizabeth Jennings' New Collected Poems

The Familiar Spirits of Elizabeth Jennings's new collection of poems are those of the changing seasons, the good and the unsettling ghosts of the past, and the gracious familiars who console and instruct. There are parents, but also a beloved sister whose life has run its different course parallel to the poet's, and through whom she can infer a different world. This book revisits childhood and finds forgotten voices, discovering devotion, and giving as generously as Jennings always does a candid, reciprocal grace. The world of urban violence persists nearby, and she dwells with fascination on aspects of love which can grow, fray and snap, and those which survive in an age of troubled values.
    Familiar Spirits includes sonnets, lyrical poems, and writing which, as so often in Jennings, experiments with longer cadences and with a free verse indebted to William Carlos Williams. But her characteristic eloquence is formal, metrical, taut, the stanzas handled never mechanically but with subtlety and bending, occasionally makeshift, occasionally broken, by the pressure of feeling.