Poetry review – NOT MY BEST SIDE: John Forth admires this new selection of U A Fanthorpe’s poetry for its laconic and compassionate voice and its comic precision
Not My Best Side
U.A. Fanthorpe
(ed. John Greening)
Baylor University Press
ISBN 9781481321464
278pp US$18.99
Fancy a book full of insight, metaphor, wit and surprise, with 200 pages of poems formally nurtured in familiar ground but showing no signs of having been toiled over? Or, if you hope to write, how about a guide that’s bound to fall open at something you’ll wish you could have come up with? Often, at the start of poetry courses, younger students would venture in desperation that the writing ‘flows well’ or that the words flow and make us feel like we’re there. So I invented a swear-box, to which anyone using the word flow or failing to say how we’re made to feel like we’re there would make an imaginary donation. The box was a good joke, or so I think we thought at the time.
Given a Peterloo Collected (2005) and a bigger Enitharmon New & Collected (2010) – followed by a small Selected (2013) – it is clear that the battle to keep U.A.Fanthorpe in print was already won, though sadly both those houses are now gone. All that’s left to win over is the American market. At just under half the content in each of the two big volumes, this handsome paperback is fronted by Ucello’s painting of St. George & the Dragon (as was Fanthorpe’s first Peterloo book in 1978). A dozen or so ‘new’ poems are drawn from the Enitharmon and seven from two posthumous books of early work. UK completists will enjoy picking over what gets in or left out from eight Peterloo collections. John Greening presents an alphabetical order of titles, reminding us that the poet did the same in one of her books and was similarly represented by R.V. Bailey in editing the early work – and also that ‘development’ was in any case not the poet’s most significant priority, given that she began by writing fully-formed poems so late in her life.
Greening has added an introduction and a dozen pages of excellent notes – the latter useful at home as well as in the USA. There’s also a deft, welcoming preface by A.E.Stallings, glancing at Fanthorpe’s syllabic forms, although her belief (shared by Andrew Motion on the back cover) in the partial influence of Larkin seems to come at the expense of highlighting some hints of musical affinity with Stevie Smith. The blurb tells of other important aspects: the verse is instinctively English, often very moving, frequently funny and invariably rooted in her faith. This selection foregrounds her faith (she was a Quaker) together with the quietly influential “Not My Best Side” which demonstrated that Knights, Maidens & Monsters could still pull up trees. Even Ucello’s figures use modern idioms, a driving force for subsequent comedy, since the poet emphasised her interest in ‘people at the edge of things’. In fact she was quietly subversive, identifying poets as smugglers who ‘import things clandestinely’. But the first impressions for new contemporary readers will be of clarity and a cunningly concealed directness, and the alphabetical ruse allows a pre-Peterloo poem to appear in all its quiet glory near the start:
I am too clear.
I don’t know how to hide
My meaning from your view.
One look inside
Shows curtains, walls,
Fixtures and fittings too.
I am the sort of house
You look straight through...
[“Apology for Clarity”]
Such directness seems even more obvious in another fairly early poem ‘rooted’ in her faith:
Like all miracles, it has a rational
Explanation; and like all miracles insists
on being miraculous...
except that this opening is then submerged by a detailed account of a drive in the old car with two dogs through uninspiring landscape to witness hang-gliding, and, yes, we’re made to feel like we’re there. John Greening, in ‘spinning’ his selection towards U.A’s ‘spiritually inclined poems’, assures us that ‘visits were seldom as solemn as Eliot’s…she is perfectly at ease imagining everyday voices of biblical characters…or poking gentle fun at clerical behaviour’. Even so, the poem’s ending won’t hesitate to pull out the stops:
We saw for ourselves how it was done
From take-off to landing, but nothing cancelled
The cipher of the soaring, crucified men,
Which we couldn’t unravel; which gave us
Also, somehow, the freedom of air. Not
In vast caravels, triumphs of engineering,
But as men always wanted, simply,
Like a bird at home in the sky.
[“Hang-gliders in January”]
A different kind of clarity/directness is highlighted in “Another Swan Poem” from which we learn that ‘This swan knows too much poetry’. A blend of humour and slight menace dominates interaction with the bird, allowing its tentative ‘feeders’ to chance an arm until the final lines confirm both humour and reticence:
This is not a good poem about a swan,
But it might be the bravest. It is also true.
And it’s true we can’t miss the Larkin comparisons that haunt one poem after another, in spite of A.E Stallings softening her assertion by admitting that ‘Fanthorpe is not so bleak as Larkin’:
The trolley’s rattle dispatches
The last lover. Now we can relax
Into illness, and reliably abstracted
Nurses will straighten our sheets…
All’s well, all’s quiet as the great
Ark noses her way into night,
Caulked, battened, blessed for her trip,
And behind, the gulls crying.
[“After Visiting Hours”]
A number of poems empathise with the plight of children or risk seeing the world through their eyes. “At Cowan Bridge” outlines the near miss when Emily escaped the child-killing grounds of her school only to remind herself and us of it when Cathy cries ‘Let me in’ at the window of Wuthering Heights. The innocence of Felicity in “Seminar” has a child listening owl-like to everything said in a school-room discussion of Robert Frost, and perhaps stumbling upon a unique reading of “Stopping By Woods”. Another child is bewildered when being detained in a school-room for wrong-doing and we’re given his perceptions of ‘time’, defined for him only by what happens in it, until the teacher remembers he is there:
So she slotted him back into schooltime
And he got home in time for teatime,
Nexttime, notimeforthatnowtime…
[“Half-past Two”]
An old favourite that was often used to blow the doors off a teacherly fortress is “Reports”, which indirectly freed children from a significant yoke:
Has made a sound beginning
Strikes the right note:
Encouraging, but dull.
Don’t give them anything
To take hold of. Even
Pronouns are dangerous.
She even manages some sympathy for poets and their good, bad or indifferent products. In the ‘New & Collected’ we find her steering us through a comical list of poets’ day-jobs:
Worrying that their best thoughts coincided
With a perforation problem, or Cromwell
Declaring war on the Scots…
[“Harried”]
In another late poem “Entertaining Poets” we ambiguously witness either a shortfall in their entertainment value or inviting them over for tea and cake. The speaker concludes that it’s kinder…
...to be fooled by their
Camouflage, pretend
These are our equals, not creatures
Helplessly wired to the wrong
End of the Muse’s one-way telephone line.
The critic and theorist Terry Eagleton is shown even less mercy for one of his famed deconstructions of the sonnet:
What you mustn’t do is collude with it. This
Is bad for the sonnet, and will only encourage it
To be eloquent. You must question it closely….
[“Knowing Sonnets”]
And we mustn’t forget poor Senator Yeats (“He Refuses to Read His Public’s Favourite Poem”) whose hatred of his “Lake Isle” is legendary (‘A poem read twelve times in public is dead and finished’) being asked to read it again and again when he wants nothing so much as to leave his younger self on the shelf.
U.A. Fanthorpe’s younger self is really only visible in the posthumous collections of early work edited by her partner R.V. Bailey. One poem directly addressing her childhood memories is “Infidelity” which describes a set-to between her boating father and ‘Tiddler the fat waterman’:
Our father was a heavy man, a judge,
A barrister, a man of substance. When
He boarded her, the dinghy nearly foundered.
We blushed for him, and scrambled to the bows
But childish bones couldn’t redress his weight.
Maybe here is another similarity with Larkin, in that when Anthony Thwaite (seemingly against the poet’s wishes) published a posthumous ‘Collected’, his readers discovered a couple of book-loads of rejected work they would’ve donated their right arms to have written. This too is a book of show-stoppers you can open anywhere to find one you’d like to share around. What defines it all is not only the ordinary presented in an unusual way, but also the extraordinary made to appear normal. The dramas are lived experience, and the voice is laconic and compassionate. Most remarkable is a rare comic precision enabling her to lay bare what’s complex in a single phrase. It is poetry with a smile on its face. Much of it possesses the tenacity, humour and page-turner elements of a good joke (though not always with punch-lines). Our erstwhile St. George’s task is on a par with introducing the monologues of Joyce Grenfell to a digital market, starting with an adjusted focus and a new lens. American readers are in for a treat from this most adroit of late-starters whose first book appeared when she was nearly fifty.
Jun 6 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – U A Fanthorpe
Poetry review – NOT MY BEST SIDE: John Forth admires this new selection of U A Fanthorpe’s poetry for its laconic and compassionate voice and its comic precision
Fancy a book full of insight, metaphor, wit and surprise, with 200 pages of poems formally nurtured in familiar ground but showing no signs of having been toiled over? Or, if you hope to write, how about a guide that’s bound to fall open at something you’ll wish you could have come up with? Often, at the start of poetry courses, younger students would venture in desperation that the writing ‘flows well’ or that the words flow and make us feel like we’re there. So I invented a swear-box, to which anyone using the word flow or failing to say how we’re made to feel like we’re there would make an imaginary donation. The box was a good joke, or so I think we thought at the time.
Given a Peterloo Collected (2005) and a bigger Enitharmon New & Collected (2010) – followed by a small Selected (2013) – it is clear that the battle to keep U.A.Fanthorpe in print was already won, though sadly both those houses are now gone. All that’s left to win over is the American market. At just under half the content in each of the two big volumes, this handsome paperback is fronted by Ucello’s painting of St. George & the Dragon (as was Fanthorpe’s first Peterloo book in 1978). A dozen or so ‘new’ poems are drawn from the Enitharmon and seven from two posthumous books of early work. UK completists will enjoy picking over what gets in or left out from eight Peterloo collections. John Greening presents an alphabetical order of titles, reminding us that the poet did the same in one of her books and was similarly represented by R.V. Bailey in editing the early work – and also that ‘development’ was in any case not the poet’s most significant priority, given that she began by writing fully-formed poems so late in her life.
Greening has added an introduction and a dozen pages of excellent notes – the latter useful at home as well as in the USA. There’s also a deft, welcoming preface by A.E.Stallings, glancing at Fanthorpe’s syllabic forms, although her belief (shared by Andrew Motion on the back cover) in the partial influence of Larkin seems to come at the expense of highlighting some hints of musical affinity with Stevie Smith. The blurb tells of other important aspects: the verse is instinctively English, often very moving, frequently funny and invariably rooted in her faith. This selection foregrounds her faith (she was a Quaker) together with the quietly influential “Not My Best Side” which demonstrated that Knights, Maidens & Monsters could still pull up trees. Even Ucello’s figures use modern idioms, a driving force for subsequent comedy, since the poet emphasised her interest in ‘people at the edge of things’. In fact she was quietly subversive, identifying poets as smugglers who ‘import things clandestinely’. But the first impressions for new contemporary readers will be of clarity and a cunningly concealed directness, and the alphabetical ruse allows a pre-Peterloo poem to appear in all its quiet glory near the start:
I am too clear. I don’t know how to hide My meaning from your view. One look inside Shows curtains, walls, Fixtures and fittings too. I am the sort of house You look straight through... [“Apology for Clarity”]Such directness seems even more obvious in another fairly early poem ‘rooted’ in her faith:
except that this opening is then submerged by a detailed account of a drive in the old car with two dogs through uninspiring landscape to witness hang-gliding, and, yes, we’re made to feel like we’re there. John Greening, in ‘spinning’ his selection towards U.A’s ‘spiritually inclined poems’, assures us that ‘visits were seldom as solemn as Eliot’s…she is perfectly at ease imagining everyday voices of biblical characters…or poking gentle fun at clerical behaviour’. Even so, the poem’s ending won’t hesitate to pull out the stops:
We saw for ourselves how it was done From take-off to landing, but nothing cancelled The cipher of the soaring, crucified men, Which we couldn’t unravel; which gave us Also, somehow, the freedom of air. Not In vast caravels, triumphs of engineering, But as men always wanted, simply, Like a bird at home in the sky. [“Hang-gliders in January”]A different kind of clarity/directness is highlighted in “Another Swan Poem” from which we learn that ‘This swan knows too much poetry’. A blend of humour and slight menace dominates interaction with the bird, allowing its tentative ‘feeders’ to chance an arm until the final lines confirm both humour and reticence:
And it’s true we can’t miss the Larkin comparisons that haunt one poem after another, in spite of A.E Stallings softening her assertion by admitting that ‘Fanthorpe is not so bleak as Larkin’:
The trolley’s rattle dispatches The last lover. Now we can relax Into illness, and reliably abstracted Nurses will straighten our sheets… All’s well, all’s quiet as the great Ark noses her way into night, Caulked, battened, blessed for her trip, And behind, the gulls crying. [“After Visiting Hours”]A number of poems empathise with the plight of children or risk seeing the world through their eyes. “At Cowan Bridge” outlines the near miss when Emily escaped the child-killing grounds of her school only to remind herself and us of it when Cathy cries ‘Let me in’ at the window of Wuthering Heights. The innocence of Felicity in “Seminar” has a child listening owl-like to everything said in a school-room discussion of Robert Frost, and perhaps stumbling upon a unique reading of “Stopping By Woods”. Another child is bewildered when being detained in a school-room for wrong-doing and we’re given his perceptions of ‘time’, defined for him only by what happens in it, until the teacher remembers he is there:
So she slotted him back into schooltime And he got home in time for teatime, Nexttime, notimeforthatnowtime… [“Half-past Two”]An old favourite that was often used to blow the doors off a teacherly fortress is “Reports”, which indirectly freed children from a significant yoke:
She even manages some sympathy for poets and their good, bad or indifferent products. In the ‘New & Collected’ we find her steering us through a comical list of poets’ day-jobs:
Worrying that their best thoughts coincided With a perforation problem, or Cromwell Declaring war on the Scots… [“Harried”]In another late poem “Entertaining Poets” we ambiguously witness either a shortfall in their entertainment value or inviting them over for tea and cake. The speaker concludes that it’s kinder…
The critic and theorist Terry Eagleton is shown even less mercy for one of his famed deconstructions of the sonnet:
What you mustn’t do is collude with it. This Is bad for the sonnet, and will only encourage it To be eloquent. You must question it closely…. [“Knowing Sonnets”]And we mustn’t forget poor Senator Yeats (“He Refuses to Read His Public’s Favourite Poem”) whose hatred of his “Lake Isle” is legendary (‘A poem read twelve times in public is dead and finished’) being asked to read it again and again when he wants nothing so much as to leave his younger self on the shelf.
U.A. Fanthorpe’s younger self is really only visible in the posthumous collections of early work edited by her partner R.V. Bailey. One poem directly addressing her childhood memories is “Infidelity” which describes a set-to between her boating father and ‘Tiddler the fat waterman’:
Maybe here is another similarity with Larkin, in that when Anthony Thwaite (seemingly against the poet’s wishes) published a posthumous ‘Collected’, his readers discovered a couple of book-loads of rejected work they would’ve donated their right arms to have written. This too is a book of show-stoppers you can open anywhere to find one you’d like to share around. What defines it all is not only the ordinary presented in an unusual way, but also the extraordinary made to appear normal. The dramas are lived experience, and the voice is laconic and compassionate. Most remarkable is a rare comic precision enabling her to lay bare what’s complex in a single phrase. It is poetry with a smile on its face. Much of it possesses the tenacity, humour and page-turner elements of a good joke (though not always with punch-lines). Our erstwhile St. George’s task is on a par with introducing the monologues of Joyce Grenfell to a digital market, starting with an adjusted focus and a new lens. American readers are in for a treat from this most adroit of late-starters whose first book appeared when she was nearly fifty.