Here, too, his unusual gift for bizarre imagery, his "Martian" eye, strengthens the pathos, as when he compares his dying mother to a Christmas tree. It is all the more moving for being so improbable:
I remember
that watching her go
seemed a process so slow
it was like watching the candles burn
out on the Christmas tree. Blue
uncertain
faltering buds of light
out to sea on a starless night.
U. A. Fanthorpe had a sharp eye for strangeness too; it was the shock she felt at "the strangeness of other people" which led her to begin writing poems in middle age, as she notes in the foreword to this final collection of her work. The patients at the neurological hospital in Bristol, where she worked as a receptionist, are not so much described in her poems as inhabited. Seen through their eyes, the world reveals its cruelty as well as its odd grace. Even as a beginning poet, Fanthorpe could suddenly take flight from the unlikeliest of vantage points. In "After Visiting Hours", when the visitors have left, the patients "rehearse/Their repertoire of movements" and after the "vagrant/Doctors appear, wreathed in stethoscopes/Like South Sea dancers":
All's well, all's quiet as the great
Ark noses her way into night,
Caulked, battened, blessed for her trip,
And behind, the gulls crying.
