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Frances Horovitz, who had been suffering from cancer of the ear, died on 2 October 1983, aged 45

There are few poets with whom the word 'beauty' can be associated without exaggeration or embarrassment, but Frances Horovitz was without exception beautiful. Her face, her voice, her spirit, her poems — they were, to echo Yeats's 'Among School Children', like the leaf, the blossom and the bole of one tree.

When I first met Frances in Marley-le-Roi near Paris in May, 1978, I was rather in awe of her. We had been invited to take part in an Anglo-French conference on poetry, and being among the few women there, we were given a suite of rooms to share. On the first night I collapsed from a surfeit of drink and incomprehensible French. It was Frances who calmly put me to bed, as if turbulent air travel, voluble French poets and an excess of wine were normal, if regrettable, impediments to the pure pursuit of poetry. For the rest of the week —indeed; for the rest of her life — Frances was to me a personification of purity and integrity. Shc was not, as Auden said of Yeats, 'silly like us', although she never condemned silliness. But her talent was serious, and she treated it seriously. When she was preparing a reading for BBC radio, she rehearsed the programme again and again, carefully marking the scripted poems with her own notations for breathing, pausing and emphasis. Her own poems she revised with the same meticulous care, submitting them to her friends for criticism only after she had honed them to nearly perfect dimensions already. She had an instinctive sense of right proportion and a terrifying will to do herself and her art justice.

I remember when she was staying with us in Sunderland in the autumn of 1982. She had had one operation on her ear already, after which the surgeon had prescribed radiotherapy. Sometimes this treatment brought on acute pain for which she was given morphine,—to which she was allergic. One night, when she was due to travel to Liverpool the next day for a reading, the morphine brought on a spell of vomiting which lasted all night. The next morning I tentatively brought a cup of tea to her door. To my astonishment, out hobbled Frances, fully dressed and ready for travel, having phoned for a taxi to take her to Newcastle station. 'But you're not going!' I exclaimed. 'Oh yes,' she replied, 'I promised I would, they're counting on me. And anyway, I'd rather do something than lie about here moaning.' And putting aside all protests, she vanished out the front door.

During the last months of Frances's working life she pitted her will against her illness until she could go on no more. When finally she realized that she would have to submit, she was overcome with pain and loss. Perhaps only Roger Garfitt knows what she suffered then. But later, when it appeared that all might be lost, she recovered her natural courage and faith. She had always been a Christian — what you might call a Kilpeck Christian, one whose sense of nature was as strong as her sense of God. With the help of her friend Father Brocard Sewell and others in the Christian community, she attained an equilibrium which lasted for the rest of her short life.

The tribute paid and the love shown by her fellow poets touched her deeply. And the benefit fund set up by Gillian Clarke and Paul Hyland eased her worries about the future of her and Michael Horovitz's son, Adam. Two poems written while she was in hospital show how much, near the end, her mind was preoccupied with Adam. But the fine poems of her last collection, Snow Light, Water Light, forecast her own death in the images of light and dark, water and stone, she always made her own. We who loved her miss her very much. But everyone inherits these poems which, like Hardy's and Edward Thomas's, will outlast all fluctuations of fashion and heal many differences between poets who have united, in recent months, to give so much to her