"Ursula Fanthorpe was born in Kent in 1929, read English at St Anne's
College, Oxford, and taught at Cheltenham Ladies' College.
What stung
her into poetry was her experience as a medical receptionist at a
Bristol neurological hospital where she worked after she had left
Cheltenham.
In the introduction to her Collected Poems Fanthorpe dates
the beginning of her poetry career precisely. "On 18 April 1974 I
started writing poems".
From the beginning she sided with the patients
against the doctors, a characteristic stance. She observed the gallery
of characters who passed before her en route to the doctors and made
poetry from their raw troubles.
There was no sense of appropriation in
this – everything Fanthorpe touched in poetry was handled with dignity.
She said: "At once I'd found the subject that I'd been looking for all
my life: the strangeness of other people, particularly neurological
patients, and how it felt to be them, and to use their words."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/u-a-fanthorpe-poet-who-championed-the-underdog-and-whose-work-was-rooted-in-english-history-1677685.html
