U. A. Fanthorpe
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Standard Name: Fanthorpe, U. A.
Birth Name: Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
The poetry of
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.