'Jeni Couzyn's poetry is natural and unique. It has real simplicity, the sort that makes every word electric, without a false note.' - Ted Hughes

'There have been debates about a female consciousness, a feminine perspective, even a feminist syntax. What would women write if they wrote with a free hand? It seems to me that Jeni Couzyn is one of the modern writers who has achieved this freedom. Life by Drowning (Selected Poems) is one of the most probing and intelligent books of poems by a woman that I have read. For Couzyn, writing seems a vehicle for a larger project - to write is to extend the boundaries of understanding of self and world.' *

In a writing career spanning thirty-five years, Jeni Couzyn has published fifteen books, including two books for children, and three anthologies. The third of these, her ground-breaking Contemporary Women Poets, (Bloodaxe) has been a set text at schools and universities since its publication in 1985. In Britain where she lives and works as a psychotherapist, in her native South Africa, where she is the director of The Bethesda Arts Centre, and in her adopted country, Canada, Couzyn has performed at literary festivals, broadcast on radio and television, written poems commissioned for films, "talking sculpture", Robert Graves’ eightieth birthday, the BBC’s fiftieth birthday. She has organized readings including the explosive all-night 'Poetry Marathon' at London’s Roundhouse, and she founded the first weekly open poetry reading in London — 'Poetryround'. Her writing has received awards from the Arts Council and the Canada Council.

In South Africa she taught in black schools at the height of the Apartheid era. In the UK she fought for poets’ rights to a minimum wage, and in the seventies, when women poets were still patronized and silenced by the literary establishment, for women poets to be heard. The Sunday Times described her work at this time as "dark humour and bitter vision". Of her mystical cycle of poems, In the Skin House, (Bloodaxe,1993), Kevan Johnson wrote in Poetry Review: "Fragile and far removed from the hurly-burly of most contemporary writing, Couzyn’s poetry uses music as a means towards silence."

Her cycle of poems in A Time to be Born, charting childbirth, from conception to birth and into babyhood, is the first time a poet has tackled in a major sequence, this universal subject.

'Couzyn manages to touch both the mythic and the mundane, the beautiful and the grotesque, the exalted and the humorous in her account of giving birth. These are the love poems, she seems to insist, that are the centre of eternal human experience. The poet has created a myth of the self, of the growth of a mind, that has the integrity of a quest: from the ocean territory of the childish self growing into consciousness, to maternity and the creation of the new child whose mystery, could we hold to it, might renew our faith. In this tough-minded, generous, tender book, we see the stretch of a woman’s mind over the territory of our collective lives and the account is exhilarating and deeply moving.'*

*Rosemary Sullivan (Books in Canada) Editor of Canadian Women poets, Canadian Short Stories, biographer of Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Elizabeth Smart.