Hesketh, Phoebe (Rayner) 1909-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born January 29, 1909, in Preston, Lancashire, England; died February 24, 2005, in Euxton, Lancashire, England. Writer. Hesketh was a poet best known for her verses about nature. Gaining an appreciation for the outdoors as a child, she would often go on walks in the Lake District of England with her father, who would recite poetry to her. Hesketh left school at the age of seventeen in order to help her dying mother. When she could, she took walks in the moors and refined her skills as a horse rider. After marrying and beginning a family, she published her first collection of verses, simply titled Poems, in 1939. Although she worked as women's page editor for the Bolton Evening News during World War II, she otherwise focused on her writing. An early poem, "Ploughing," was awarded the Greenwood Prize, seemingly marking Hesketh for a promising career as a poet. But despite going on to publish many more collections and gaining admirers such as fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, she never gained significant critical attention. Early collections by Hesketh include books such as Lean Forward Spring! (1948) and Out of the Dark: New Poems (1954). These early verses proved to be much more optimistic than her later poems, which are tinged by sadness as she lost friends and family, including her son and husband, and her mentor, Herbert Palmer. Among her later collections are The Eighth Day: Selected Poems, 1948-1978 (1980) and The Leave Train: New and Selected Poems (1994). Hesketh also wrote poems for children that are collected in A Song of Sunlight (1974) and Six of the Best (1989), and penned the autobiographical Rivington: The Story of a Village (1972), the biography My Aunt Edith (1966), and other nonfiction works.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Daily Post (Liverpool, England), March 1, 2005, p. 13.

Guardian (London, England), March 3, 2005, p. 29.

Independent (London, England), February 28, 2005, p. 35.

Times (London, England), February 21, 2005, p. 50.