For some years now I've enjoyed the poetry of U A Fanthorpe. Her collected poems range across human experience as seen by a perceptive, compassionately critical poet whose emotional intelligence and moral sensibility make hers a voice that 'looks humanely forth on human life.' Reflecting on the NHS, or the loss of passion and humanities in the Universities, or identifying those who now inhabit 'the draughty corners of the abandoned Welfare State', she has little interest in acid and lament, but rather holds up human experience to a scrutiny that is looking for what is of value, what is the dignity, what the obligations we all have to each other, to enrich and nurture life, and resist what withers, diminishes and devalues.
She always writes poetry for the Advent Season and most earlier collections include some of these - others are written for friends and family.
The Gardener at Christmas
He has done all that needs to be done.
Rake, fork, spade, cleaned and oiled,
Idle indoors; seeds, knotty with destiny, rattle
Inside their paper jackets. The travelling birds
Have left; predictable locals
Mooch in the early dusk.
He dreams of a future in apples,
Of three white lilies in flower,
Of a tree that could bear a man.
He sits back and waits
For it all to happen.
U A Fanthorpe, Collected Poems 1978-2003 (Calstock: Peterloo, 2005) page 400
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