U A Fanthorpe

A few years ago I bought – new – the Selected Poems of U A Fanthorpe,  drawn in by the empathy and humility of the early poems. Over the years I accumulated more volumes of her poetry.  At one stage I suggested to a colleague teaching RE that he set the students to writing religious limericks as she had done, but he was, I think, too evangelical to see this as other than a blasphemy.

These limericks highlighted one strand in the poetry, the humour, sometimes wit, used to explore human attitudes; what is missing is landscape, and to a large extent nature, except as an element in a human landscape, and where stripped back, stripped back to show humans in earlier landscapes.  There is mythology, and Gods appear, but often the homelier gods of hearth and home, those more intimate with humanity and human hopes and failings.

At the centre of the work is humanity, seen with love, seen with a desire for fairness; common people live as a gentle criticism of the intellectual, who criticises the homespun of Patience Strong, or who pins down and intellectualises folk song and folk life.

A few years ago my daughter lived in a small village outside Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire, and one day, venturing into town a lamppost notice told me that the church fete would be opened in a few minutes time by Fanthorpe.  I abandoned family, and ran to the church; browsed the stalls for a few minutes, and then saw her. Small, grey haired, ordinary. At the end I went up, and unlike my usual self was too tongue-tied to do more than mutter platitudes. Her face and eyes lie up, and she thanked me, asked me where I was from, and said she would remember me.

And then she died, and yet, I am sure that somewhere in draft, I figure, stammering, her book unheld in metaphorical cellophane in my hand, in a never to be published poem.