Touch. How much it starts and how much ends.
Each sacrament demands it and all love,
Whether of passion or the play of friends,

Asks for its use. It started this world off.
The touch of God and all the universe
Stirred into being at its every move.

Eden -- the potent tale of our reverse,
Was darkened by the picking of a fruit
When the touch was disobedient. Its curse

Spoilt touch and yet it also somehow brought
God-Man to us and put him at our will.
Touch can demonstrate an arcane thought

And love surrenders when its power goes still.
'Touch'

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.