Auden wrote of “A poet's hope: to be,/like some valley cheese,/ local, but prized elsewhere.” That hope was made fact in the case of the much-loved poet U.A.Fanthorpe, who died in April. Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire was her happy home for 35 years, and she was well known and warmly greeted in that small town. Today and next weekend, celebratory readings of her poems will take place in Wotton and in Cheltenham at the literary festival. Fanthorpe taught at Cheltenham Ladies College for 16 years (for half that time she was head of English), until, in her early forties, she became what she called “a middle-aged dropout”.

Ursula Fanthorpe (a name she disliked: she preferred to be known as U.A.) was, and is, an inspiring example to all late developers. She didn't write what she considered to be a “serious” poem until she was 45, having abandoned teaching for a succession of temporary secretarial jobs, eventually becoming a clerk/receptionist at a Bristol hospital.

It was her indefatigable champion Harry Chambers (editor of the poetry magazine Phoenix and founder of Peterloo Poets) who in 1975 sent me Fanthorpe's poem Not my Best Side. I was delighted to publish in Encounter this highly original and entertaining triptych, a fantasia inspired by Uccello's painting St George and the Dragon in the National Gallery. In it, the speakers in turn are the dragon, the maiden and St George. The poem stands behind the title of Fanthorpe's first book, Side Effects, published by Chambers in 1978.

That book was enthusiastically received, and Fanthorpe went on to become both popular and a critical success, praised by the likes of Michael Foot and Kenneth Baker, studied at A level, and awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2003. Her Selected Poems appeared in 1986. Her Collected Poems was published in 2005. It has been said that, though Fanthorpe was loaded with such Establishment honours, she never acquired an Establishment voice. There was something subversive about her work - she was an outsider, someone who spoke for the voiceless.

Many of her earlier poems were concerned with marginalised people that she came across in her hospital job, such as Koreen in From the Remand Centre:

Eleven stone and nineteen years of want

Flex inside Koreen. Voices speak to her

In dreams of love. She needs it like a fag,

Ever since Mum, who didn't think her daft,

Died suddenly in front of her. She holds

Her warder lovingly with powerful palms,

Slings head upon her shoulders, cries Get Lost

Meaning I love you, and her blows caress.

Fanthorpe was a Quaker, an erudite historian, an evocative observer of places. She was an entertainer, but without any of the ingratiating manners that that word might suggest. Her appeal cuts across all the divisions that separate people in the often quarrelsome and opinionated “poetry scene”.

That wide appeal can be suggested by the number of distinguished poets who wanted to take part in the memorial celebration this afternoon in the parish church in Wotton-under-Edge. Reading Fanthorpe's poems today and talking about her, the poets include the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the National Poet for Wales Gillian Clarke, Wendy Cope, James Fenton and Jackie Kay. On the margin - but really at the very centre of all this - will be Fanthorpe's close partner of many years, Rosie Bailey, herself a poet who was an essential voice in the countless public readings she and Fanthorpe gave to such acclaim all over the country.

In a recent critical study of Fanthorpe, Acts of Resistance, Elizabeth Sandie writes of one of the most acute and affectionate poems, The Poet's Companion, that it “simultaneously satirises the traditional role of the woman in partnership with a male writer, but one suspects embeds some of the attributes of her own supportive partner and shows her own good fortune”. It was Bailey, indeed, who encouraged her to write, told her which magazines to send poems to, posted them, and selflessly handled all the “business” of being a writer.

Though Fanthorpe travelled widely as a poet, her favourite journey was “always home, from wherever, to Wotton”. Here is an early poem she never published, because she thought it “not good enough for Wotton”. But Rosie thinks her admirers would like to see it.

Fringe Town

She nests between Severn and heaven, Furling herself round the limestone edge.

She is just Wotton; not glamorous Stow, Posh Swells or Slaughters or Bourton-on- the-Water.

She's modestly special. Has her own climate (Fogs on the hill, sunshine below).

Her blackbirds sing louder than others do, her people Smile when they meet. Their conversation

Rings like birdsong through Long Street. Cotswold Way walkers

Pop out like primrose in March, and swifts

Flick along the summer air. This is an old kingdom,

Self-possessed; way out; out of the way.

©The Estate of U. A. Fanthorpe

Anthony Thwaite's Collected Poems is published by Enitharmon Press

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