U. A. Fanthorpe

Ursula Askham Fanthorpe (1929-2009) born in southeast London. Fanthorpe was the daughter of a judge, or as she put it "middle-class but honest parents.” Her first volume of poetry, Side Effects (1978), has been said to "unsentimentally recover the invisible lives and voices of psychiatric patients. She said “Poetry is important because it reaches the places that other kinds of writing can't reach. Poetry has all the voices—wit, sincerity, pastiche, tragedy, delight, and most importantly it's with us from the start of our lives to the end: at the start of our lives, with lullabies and mothers crooning to babies, at the end of our life, with hymns over a grave.”

Atlas

There is a kind of love called maintenance 

Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it; 

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget 

The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs; 

Which answers letters; which knows the way 

The money goes; which deals with dentists 

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains, 

And postcards to the lonely; which upholds 

The permanently rickety elaborate 

Structures of living, which is Atlas. 

And maintenance is the sensible side of love, 

Which knows what time and weather are doing 

To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring; 

Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers 

My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps 

My suspect edifice upright in air,

As Atlas did the sky.

— UA Fanthorpe (peterloo poets 1995)