Nothing Like Love

Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of ‘Warning’, her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over the more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of literary forms, new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories, she has always written what she thinks if as ‘songs’. For this new book she has brought back some of those best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph’s ability to convey the experiences of a ‘thinking heart’ is in no way diminished.