Not My Best Side

Selected Poems

by U. A. Fanthorpe

Edited by John Greening

Preface by A. E. Stallings

Published by: Baylor University Press

Imprint: Baylor University Press

Sales Date: 2024-10-01

Paperback
ISBN 9781481321464
258 Pages

$18.99

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Description
Authors
Praise

The English poet U. A. Fanthorpe (1929-2009) liked to call herself "a middle-aged drop-out," having abandoned a successful teaching career to focus on her poetry, even concealing her Oxford degree so she could find paid work--at Hoover, then as a hospital receptionist. This gave her a chance to study people, which is what her wonderful poems do best.

Fanthorpe's verse is instinctively English, often very moving, frequently funny, invariably rooted in her faith. Fanthorpe and her partner, Rosie Bailey, became Quakers in the 1980s. These poems touch on spiritual matters, dramatize Bible stories, and are underpinned by a profound moral sense. Fanthorpe does not judge; rather, she watches, records, and allows her words to do their work.

When her first small-press collection appeared in 1978, it was an unexpected hit. Penguin brought out an early Selected Poems in 1986, and her poetry began to reach beyond the usual readership, praised by celebrities and even politicians. She found herself on the school exam syllabus, then receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. She was the first woman to be nominated for the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Despite Fanthorpe's domestic success, her work is still largely unfamiliar beyond the UK. In this volume, Not My Best Side: Selected Poems, distinguished poet John Greening selects poems from across her books, adding an introduction and notes. Oxford's current Professor of Poetry, A. E. Stallings, also contributes a brilliant preface.

U. A. Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was a prolific English poet who produced nine full-length collections of poetry. She was awarded a CBE in 2001 and the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 2003.

John Greening is a versatile scholar, critic, editor, playwright, and teacher. He has authored a half-dozen studies in British and Irish poetry and has also written, produced, and published a number of libretti and plays.

A. E. Stallings is a US-born poet, critic, and translator who lives in Greece. She has published four volumes of poetry, and a selected ( This Afterlife, from FSG), and three books of verse translation, most recently an illustrated version of the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. She has received numerous awards, including an NEA grant in translation, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. She studied classics at the University of Georgia and at Oxford University, and is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

U.A. Fanthorpe's poems occupy a distinguished place in the pantheon of British poets whose work reconciles lucidity with mystery. Her subjects often start life within the confines of familiar experience and then move towards the edge of what is definitely known; the language in which she records this movement is itself a negotiation between the clear and the numinous. In this respect she might be called an heir to Betjeman and Larkin--but she is simultaneously and always her own person: at once consoling and surprising, and heartwarmingly generous in her sympathy with the human condition.
~Andrew Motion, Homewood Professor of the Arts, Johns Hopkins University

What joy to have Ursula Fanthorpe's poetry available in the United States--finally! She is the poet of 'the unangelic muddle' of human existence. Always entertaining and inventive, Fanthorpe gets to the unsettled heart of things whether in sharply sketched scenes from everyday life or sly glimpses of the world to come.
~Dana Gioia