Perspective
Fanthorpe’s most memorable poems are all about seeing the world through a different perspective than usual. “Unauthorised Version” is, as the title suggests, an alternative version of the well know Biblical story of Mary and Martha told from Mary’s point of view in which she refers to her sister as Marty and her brother as Lazzie. Speaking of Jesus, the story of the very first Christmas is a first-person remembrance of a donkey recalling the night his stable became crowded with visitors. In stark contrast, a Christmas night centuries later is constructed as a “Reindeer Report” in which notes that the driver is “still baffled by postcodes” and children, in addition to being more plentiful, “stay up later.”
Expanded Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis is a technical literary term which literally translates as “description” and it usually reserved for the specific act of writing about a work of visual art in a way that brings the moment contained therein to life. Technically speaking, two of Fanthorpe’s most famous poems are specifically examples of this technique. “Not my Best Side” is constructed of three stanzas which are each a direct response by one of the three individuals in the Uccello’s Renaissance painting “St. George and the Dragon.” Likewise, “The Doctor” is a poem that brings to life the still image presented in the painting of the same name by Luke Fildes. Fanthorpe possesses such a talent for this technique, however, that it becomes a more expansive theme applied to a wide variety of familiar images not necessarily represented as visual art: “Mother-in-Law” is a portrait of Queen Gertrude in that moment between Ophelia’s killing herself and all breaking loose which looks at Ophelia’s suicide from the perspective of a mother worrying about finding an appropriate match for her rather difficult son Hamlet. A more abstract example would be another famous poem, “You Will be Hearing from Us Shortly” which dismisses with artistic inspiration altogether yet nevertheless can fairly be called ekphrasis in its portrait of an image as familiar as Hamlet: the unpleasantness of a job interview.
Celebrating the Ordinary
That poem which consists of a mostly one-side job interview is surprisingly insightful and offers a load of potential interpretations. Such is one of the overarching themes of Fanthorpe: she takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary or she takes the extraordinary and makes it ordinary, but in either case winds up revealing something perhaps not seen before. As with Hamlet’s mother being a mother, Fanthorpe also brings the daughters of King Lear down from the greatness of Shakespeare to reveal them as simply daughters. At the other end of the spectrum is Alison, a young woman suffering from traumatic brain injury who looks at a picture of herself from before the injury and, in wishing she could meet that wife of her husband and that mother of her daughter is transformed into something much more mythic. Just the very titles of poems like “Old Man, Old Man,” “Mother Scrubbing the Floor,” and “Hang Gliders in January” all indicate the extent to which Fanthorpe is capable of transforming everyday people into—if not quite heroes—subjects as worthy as analyzing as the patron saint of England or legendary poet Alfred Lord Tennyson.
