Beginner's Luck

by U.A. Fanthorpe, R.V. Bailey (Editor)

When she died, in 2009, Anthony Thwaite described U.A. Fanthorpe as a 'smiling subversive with a voice like bird-song'. An encouraging example to all late developers, this particular bird's voice took its she didn't become a poet until she was 45. But these examples of her very earliest work show the latent mastery and the rapid development of the craft that would bring her wide critical acclaim and an affectionate general readership. The mysteries of the trade gradually reveal themselves as rooted in a wide and uncensored range of subject-matter, a life-time's love of words, and an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of form and voice. Recognising her role so late, she was a woman in a hurry; there wasn't time for self-consciousness or grandiose notions of 'vocation'. 'A poet,' she said, 'is a smuggler. He imports things clandestinely which are not supposed to have got through the customs.' Poetry 'happened to me', she would say. Her job? To listen, to pass it on.

96 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 2019

About the author

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe (published as U. A. Fanthorpe) was an English poet. She was educated at St Catherine's School, Bramley in Surrey and at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a first-class degree in English language and literature, and subsequently taught English at Cheltenham Ladies' College for sixteen years. She then abandoned teaching for jobs as a secretary, receptionist and hospital clerk in Bristol - in her poems, she later remembered some of the patients for whose records she had been responsible.

Her first volume of poetry, Side Effects, was published in 1978. She was "Writer-in-Residence" at St Martin's College, Lancaster (now University of Cumbria)(1983–85), as well as Northern Arts Fellow at Durham and Newcastle Universities.

In 1987 Fanthorpe went freelance, giving readings around the country and occasionally abroad. In 1994 she was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Her nine collections of poems were published by Peterloo Poets. Her Collected Poems came out in 2005. Many of her poems are for two voices. In her readings the other voice is that of Bristol academic and teacher R.V. "Rosie" Bailey, Fanthorpe's life partner of 44 years. The couple co-wrote a collection of poems, From Me To You: Love Poems, that was published in 2007 by Enitharmon.

Reviews

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A selection of the poet’s earlier, previously uncollected work - a fact rammed home by the slightly patronising title - this is the kind of volume that could so easily have been an “odds n sods“ compilation or a trawl through juvenilia with an eye out for intermittent glimpses of the artist-in-waiting. Happily, it isn’t. Though none of the poems here made it to Fanthorpe’s first collection (or subsequent ones), what they provide is proof positive that although her poetic talent sprang into being later in life, it did so fully formed and firing on all cylinders, her voice demonstrably her own right from the off.