Berowne’s Book

Berowne’s Book was written by U. A. Fanthorpe before she began to write the poetry that was to make her reputation as one of England’s most popular contemporary poets. ‘In 1974, having found that the way to get a job was to conceal my qualifications,’ she wrote, ‘I contrived to be taken on as a clerk/receptionist in a small hospital.’ As a patient at the Radcliffe when she was a student at Oxford, she’d formed a cheerful view of life in a hospital, but a neuro-psychiatric hospital provided very different experiences. It was the shock of discovering this that tipped her over into poetry. ‘Poetry’ she said, ‘struck during my first month behind the desk’. With Berowne’s Book she had already written a witty commentary on what she saw around her as she typed. Her observations are accompanied here by some of her very earliest poems. Hilarious, tender, profound and deeply humane, this series of snapshots of hospital life in the 1970s shocks partly because so much is immediately familiar today.