Moving Day

Jenny King was born in London during the Blitz. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her to write poetry as a child and overcame wartime paper rationing to make her a book to write them in. Her poems view the world calmly, thoughtfully. They consider memory, peace and its opposite, the inwardness and variety of the natural world, and how an individual relates to others. All the poems are concerned with the interest and excitement of language itself. Some use traditional patterns in unexpected ways, sometimes including rhyme, sometimes in more fluid forms. They work for clarity and memorable perception. Accessible language and natural rhythms are always important though used variously. Looking into the known - or half known - past of family history, the poem can disclose the fallibility of memory but also how present relates to past and how the present with its difficulties intrudes on any consideration of how to live. These poems result from a long writing life and study of both past and contemporary poets.

Jenny King was born in London in September 1940 - during the Blitz. She went to Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith and then to Newnham College, Cambridge where she took a degree in English. After a PGCE teaching qualification at Nottingham, she taught in Shrewsbury for three years and then married and moved to Sheffield where she continued to teach. After taking early retirement, she did an M.A. in Contemporary Poetry at Sheffield University. She is the author of three pamphlets, ’Letting the Dark Through’ (1981), ’Tenants’ (2014) and ’Midsummer’ (2020).