From Me to You

U. A. Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey write: ‘Wordsworth speaks of the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This seems an apt description of these love poems. They are not important resonant pieces of writing: they simply happened when one of us felt like writing to the other, quite often when one of us was away from home. Some of them coincided with Valentine's Days or birthdays, but that was more a matter of good luck than foresight. Quakers, rightly, maintain that Christmas Day is only one important day of all the 365 important days of the year. It's the same with love poems: they are appropriate at any time, and can be written, incidentally, to dogs, cats, etc., as well as humans. No room for Cupid. […] The pleasant thing about writing such poems, apart from having someone to write them for, is that there is no particular restriction as to subject matter. In Christmas Poems, U.A. felt the draughty awareness of the diminishing cast of subjects, from donkey to Christmas tree. With love, on the other hand, the sky's the limit.’

U. A. Fanthorpe (1929-2009) was born in Kent and read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, before training as a teacher. She was Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and then ‘became a middle-aged drop-out in order to write’, publishing her first collection, Side Effects, in 1978. Her eight volumes of poetry were all published by Peterloo, and her Selected Poems was published by Penguin in 1986. Enitharmon Press publish her Christmas Poems and From Me to You, love poems by Fanthorpe and R. V. Bailey. In 1994 U. A. Fanthorpe was the first woman to be nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. She was awarded the CBE in 2001 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003, when her Collected Poems were published. In 2010 Enitharmon published her definitive volume New and Collected Poems which features a preface by The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.