Pamphlets are demanding: a singer in so short a concert cannot afford a single false note. Jenny King’s Petersham Meadows is a perfectly programmed concert. The 22 poems enter 22 realms. She witnesses the present, the past, the spiritual, the sentimental; she moves the reader to intense feeling and to laughter. In particular she keeps time and measures it; and memory, what it refuses to relinquish. The poems are confidently invested in English and in an England that keeps giving, if we let ourselves receive its gifts.– Michael Schmidt
Jenny King grew up in London. Her parents, both teachers, encouraged her when she began to write poems and even overcame postwar paper shortages to construct a book for her to write them in. She never looked back. After graduation she worked as an English teacher and has now lived in Sheffield with her historian husband for over fifty years. Her collection Moving Day was published by Carcanet in 2021. Petersham Meadows is her third pamphlet to be published by The Poetry Business; long before these, in 1989, came one from Peter Scupham’s Mandeville Press. Her subjects are not only family and memory but also ideas, the sudden, unexpected revelations of life and the fascination of language.
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