Ursula Fanthorpe is a fabulous poet, almost becoming Poet Laureate, commenting manly on social issues.
About U A Fanthorpe
U. A. Fanthorpe (1929 – 2009) spent her earliest years in Kent. She attended St Anne’s College Oxford afterwards becoming a teacher and ultimately Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. However, she only began writing when she turned her back on her teaching career to become a receptionist at a psychiatric hospital where her observation of the “strange specialness” of the patients provided the inspiration for her first book, Side Effects. Since that relatively late start, Fanthorpe was prolific, producing 9 full-length collections, including the Forward Prize-nominated Safe as Houses and the Poetry Book Society Recommendation Consequences. She was awarded a CBE in 2001 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003.
Talking of her war-time childhood Fanthorpe said, “I think it’s important not to run away” and on the surface her poetry seems to encapsulate those traditional, stoic English values we associate with the period. Certainly England and Englishness are central themes in her work but such a reading misses the wit and sly debunking of national myth which mark Fanthorpe’s sensibility. A typical expression of this can be found in ‘Earthed’ and its wry celebration of her homeland with its “gardens,/Loved more than children”. This has Larkinesque overtones, but Fanthorpe’s work is also deeply humane as exemplified in her exploration of the lifelong aftermath of war in ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’. These themes come together in her sequence ‘Consequences’ which is rooted in her native soil and steeped in the blood of its battlefields. This is an England that has more in common with Rwanda or Bosnia than the cosy Albion of the heritage industry.
Even at her darkest Fanthorpe’s diction remains admirably understated and proverbial. She regarded a poem “as a conversation between the poet and the reader” and this is evident in her characterful and engaging delivery. Many of the poems are for two or more voices and she is joined in these instances by Dr Rosie Bailey. Clear-eyed but refusing pessimism, the hard-won balance of Fanthorpe’s poems is well expressed by the closing lines of ‘Consequences’: “the best things/ye worst times/callamitous/hope.”
