‘I would like to have known My husband’s wife, my mother’s only daughter. A bright girl she was’

‘I would like to have knownMy husband’s wife, my mother’s only daughter.A bright girl she was’

‘I wonder at her delicate angles. Her autocratic knee Like a Degas dancer’s Adjusts to the observer with airy poise’

‘That now lugs me upstairs’

UA Fanthorpe: the poet • It was while working as a National Health Service hospital receptionist that Fanthorpe found her voice as a poet; she has said that her poetry came out of the anger she felt on behalf of the patients she saw. • Fanthorpe’s poems about the NHS - especially the ‘Casehistories’ of Julie and Alison - unnerve the reader by emphasising their speakers as people capable of will, speech and action (when they appear damaged) • Alison, whose head injury has resulted in brain damage, demonstrates that she is in some ways superior to the “bright girl she was”. Injured as she is, she knows how that bright girl ended up. She is emotionally faithful, grieving every day for her father’s death; she cannot get over an event she repeatedly forgets.

‘I would like to have known My husband’s wife, my mother’s only daughter. A bright girl she was’