Fiona Sampson reviews Collected Poems 1978-2003 by U.A. Fanthorpe

I have to declare an interest. When I bought U.A.Fanthorpe's earlier Selected Poems (Penguin 1986), after the last Albert Hall Poetry International, it was the first poetry collection I'd ever owned. Avid of fiction, I knew little about contemporary poetry, of which there was next to nothing in the local library. Yet I found myself memorising large chunks from Side Effects (1978), Fanthorpe's first collection; much of which is set in the NHS unit where she worked as a receptionist for several years after leaving a distinguished teaching career.

A non-specialist, my old (young) self fell immediately for Fanthorpe's wit, her compassion and the deftness with which she completes each miniature characterisation: "The quarrelling lovers/Rained on, in the car, by dashboard-light./He pitched the tent alone; they left at dawn." ('Campsite: Maentwrog', p.38). In a Fanthorpe poem, characterisation and narrative are inextricable. We can tell what people are by what they do: what they do is entailed by who they are. And here in her first book, the poet's characteristic map of the human (its key largely "the modest apparatus/Of suburb life" (ibid), though relieved by virtuoso anthology set-pieces) is already in place.

In Side Effects, these set-pieces include 'Not my Best Side', in which all three protagonists of Uccello's George and the Dragon have their say ("I have diplomas in Dragon/Management and Virgin Reclamation" (p.43)), and the first, and in some ways the most comprehensive, of her 'England' poems, 'Earthed', which ends its list of what holds her in place with:

[..] gardens,
Loved more than children,

Bright with resourcefulness and smelling
Of rain. This narrow island charged with echoes
And whispers snares me.

As in all Fanthorpe's best poems there's a note of self-knowledge here, a wry intelligent reflection which resists the cosy; which makes her the heir less of Betjeman than of Hardy.

In Standing To, the incipient note of elegy becomes actual. There are poems of loss both metamorphosed into myth (the 'Stations Underground' sequence) and as simple reminiscence ('Father in the Railway Buffet'). With the sense of a project getting into its stride, we come across the first Christmas occasional poems, and the first "Eng. Lit." personae poems. 'Only Here for the Bier' is a well-known, but nevertheless transgressive, set of perspectives on Macbeth retold by four (women) witnesses "having a chat with some usual female confidante, like a hairdresser, or a telephone", as the poet's own artful note has it (p.94).

Voices Off (1984) seems, in retrospect, like the consolidation of Fanthorpe's commitment to certain themes. A sequence of telling vignettes from college and seminar room includes 'Seminar: Felicity and Mr Frost', a piece of lightly-handled inter-textuality. There are also flirtations with a role as women's writer: 'Women Laughing' ("Wives gleaming sleekly in public at/Husbandly jokes" (p. 153)), 'Growing Up', 'High Table', and 'From the Third Storey'.

These themes are taken up in A Watching Brief, for example in the choric 'Three Women Wordsworths'. What distinguishes these poems is, as ever, their clear-eyed acceptance of human conditions:

[...] cards from brilliant girls,
A little less incisive every year,
Reported comings, goings: another Hannah,
Another Jamie; another husband going off [...]

('Teacher's Christmas', p. 221).

Like all good books, U.A.Fanthorpe's Collected seems to gather momentum as it goes on. Somewhere around Neck-Verse, whose title nods to its transitional status, the language changes, losing some kind of musical "shadow". At the opening of 'Haunting', the first poem (p.291) in the next collection, Safe as Houses, "The ancestors. The shadow people" have stepped back a pace or two. This is not to say that Fanthorpe's diction ever slips into the mannered, or that her poetries place themselves in the study and away from the world of human experience. But, in the chamber music of the heart, she is among a select and easily-traceable group of poets who manage to compress human motivation into lyric poetry of great formal clarity. Like Hardy, she is also able to seat these human behaviours in the wide sweep of history.

In a suite of WWII poems, detective novels offer a "rare little world,/ Imagined to gentle the English through war" ('Reading Between). 'The Unprofessionals' are those who "come sheepishly, sit with you, holding hands/ from tea to tea" when "the worst thing happens". The poems here are denser; thick doorsteps of thought and evocation to fuel the reader onwards. Their shape betrays their thickening seriousness as we move on, into the "History Plays" of Consequences.

A characteristic Fanthorpe trope is the list, opening from initial half-line statement through developing enjambments into the wide sweep and opinionatedness of the whole picture: "Vocabulary of earth, names// Touch and diehard as crypts,/ Cathedrals perched on their shoulders.// No committee okayed them." ('Strong Language in Gloucestershire' p. 369); "Artists are wrong about light. They strew it/ Tastefully across landscapes, let it focus/ Thoughtfully on a forehead or a cabbage,/ Self-consciously walk down a reach of water." ('Post-op' p. 397). It's a form of seduction, of course; by the time we've finished assenting to the observations, we've assented to the conclusion too. It also lends a rhythmic homogeneity to Fanthorpe's work. Queueing for the Sun (2003), the final collection in this remarkably homogenous book, brings us poems on retirement, on Mallory on Everest, and on 'Libraries at War', whose central importance is that "When the last book's returned, there is nothing but the dark" (p.468).

To read U.A.Fanthorpe is always to enter into a gathering sense of the seriousness of poetry, of its project of recording human meaning, and, above all, of the importance of affection. "Love is so persistent, it survives/With no one's help", as one of her earliest poems ('The Watcher', p.23) points out.

U.A.Fanthorpe, Collected Poems 1978-2003
Peterloo Poets, Calstock, 2005 ISBN 1-904324-20-7 £15 468pp

Fiona Sampson's The Distance Between Us has just been published by Seren. She is the editor of Poetry Review.

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.