U. A. Fanthorpe

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Standard Name: Fanthorpe, U. A.
Birth Name: Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
The poetry of UAF 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.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photo of U. A. Fanthorpe. She has short hair, and wears large-rimmed glasses, and a dark jacket or sweater with a dog brooch over a white shirt.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Jo Shapcott
JS was, with Helen Dunmore , U. A. Fanthorpe , and Elizabeth Jennings , one of the four poets featured in no. 5 of the audio-cassette series The Poetry Quartets, issued today by the...
Anthologization Sheenagh Pugh
Other anthologies including SP 's work are Poems on the Underground, Pat McLoughlin 's edited selection of radio readings entitled Woman's Hour, The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry, Poems of the...
Anthologization Elizabeth Jennings
The Leamington Poetry Society published a 4-page leaflet (plus cover) of EJ 's poems, titled with her name, in March 1987.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Twelve years later the British Council published an audiocassette of poetry which features her...
Reception Carol Ann Duffy
CAD was deemed to be a top candidate to fill the position of Poet Laureate (left vacant by the death of Ted Hughes ). She was considered the popular choice, but the appointment went to...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Critic Deryn Rees-Jones discerns widely varied influences on CAD 's work: mainstream English poets like Wordsworth , Robert Browning , T. S. Eliot , Auden , Dylan Thomas , Larkin , and Ted Hughes ...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Women are a minority here, but well represented: Fleur Adcock , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Amy Clampitt , Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) , Emily Dickinson , Freda Downie , U. A. Fanthorpe , Vicki Feaver

Timeline

23 September 2005: A commission from The Guardian to established...

Women writers item

23 September 2005

A commission from The Guardian to established poets to write a contemporary nursery rhyme produced mostly little pieces about doom and gloom.
“Are you sitting comfortably?”. Guardian Unlimited, 23 Sept. 2005.

Texts

Fanthorpe, U. A. A Watching Brief. Peterloo Poets, 1987.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Collected Poems 1978-2003. Peterloo Poets, 2006.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Consequences. Peterloo Poets, 2000.
Fanthorpe, U. A. “Driving South”. Guardian Unlimited.
Fanthorpe, U. A., and Rosemarie Bailey. From Me to You: Love Poems. Enitharmon Press, 2008.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Homing In: Selected Local Poems. Cyder Press, 2006.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Neck-Verse. Peterloo Poets, 1992.
Fanthorpe, U. A. “Observations of a Clerk”. Poetry Review, Vol.
75
, No. 3, p. 16.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Queuing for the Sun. Peterloo Poets, 2003.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Safe as Houses. Peterloo Poets, 1995.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Selected Poems. Peterloo Poets, 1986.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Side Effects. Peterloo Poets, 1978.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Standing To. Peterloo Poets, 1982.
Cotton, John et al. The Crystal Zoo. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Fanthorpe, U. A. Voices Off. Peterloo Poets, 1984.