The poetry of U. A. Fanthorpe was hailed with some enthusiasm when it began to appear in print in the later twentieth century. She was a late starter but once started was consistently prolific. She published verse for children and snatches of autobiography and criticism; the promised novels did not appear. Most of her poems centre on ordinary people, often losers but sometimes petty tyrants, many of them women, and a few children, animals, or objects. She writes in own voice, as a meticulously detached observer, and in the voices of others in dramatic monologues. Many poems are set in hospitals, and many employ the slangy vigour of demotic speech.