I completed Episode 70 of Writers from the Vault yesterday. Notwithstanding that the entire enterprise features 35 hours of my waffling on, it is nevertheless an achievement to have come so far. As a fortnightly radio program, I had expected to to get to the one year mark, perhaps the two year, but now as the end of year three hoves into view, I remain astonished at my persistence.

I love it when I discover, or rediscover a poet I have forgotten about. Yesterday's program opened with two poems by Elizabeth Jennings, whose work I recall reading somewhat tangentially about forty years ago. What a find she is! She is regarded as a bit of a traditionalist, less an innovator, using the kind of simpler metre and rhyme that was the hallmark of poets like Larkin, Amis and Gunn.

Here is her little masterpiece, One Flesh.

Lying apart now, each in a separate bed,
He with a book, keeping the light on late,
She like a girl dreaming of childhood,
All men elsewhere - it is as if they wait
Some new event: the book he holds unread,
Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead.

Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion,
How cool they lie. They hardly ever touch,
Or if they do it is like a confession
Of having little feeling - or too much.
Chastity faces them, a destination
For which their whole lives were a preparation.

Strangely apart, yet strangely close together,
Silence between them like a thread to hold
And not wind in. And time itself's a feather
Touching them gently. Do they know they're old,
These two who are my father and my mother
Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?