Jeni Couzyn (born 1942) is a feminist poet and anthologist of South African extraction who lives and works in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Her best known collection is titled Life by Drowning: Selected Poems (1985), which includes an earlier sequence A Time to Be Born (1981) that chronicles her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter.
[6] The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English remarks that Couzyn's poetry repeatedly engages the social, political and imaginative implications of womanhood.
The Oxford Companion observes that her conception of poetry as pre-eminently oral gives much of her work clarity and immediacy.
[5][7] Couzyn edited the influential The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets (1985), set as an A-level text in British schools at the time.