From Birmingham’s city blocks to memories of war to restless skies – the quality is consistently high in this collection of work from the past 65 years
In 1951, citizens still chafing at postwar rationing were treated to the Festival of Britain; Newcastle won the FA Cup; Anthony Powell published the first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time; and in Birmingham the young Roy Fisher was appearing in the student journal Mermaid. Given that he has had 65 years to reprint these juvenilia, they must be some of the “neglected” poems announced in the subtitle of his new book.
In one of his 1951 poems, “A Vision of Four Musicians”, we are treated to “tenuous music” played by travelling musicians and “fragile as an echo from the journey they came”. Tenuous Fisher’s music may be, but over his long career he has been uniquely adept at catching echoes lost on other, noisier poets. His first pamphlet, City (1961) takes British poetry to places it had never been before, thematically and stylistically, capturing Fisher’s native Birmingham at a moment of postwar transformation and showing the effects of early exposure to the work of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. The 1960 poem “Night Walkers” was originally intended as part of City but is collected here for the first time. Pitched somewhere between TS Eliot’s “Preludes” and Terence Davies’s film Of Time and the City (“Darkness hisses at the town-blocks’ end”, and “There’s a smashed box of wind in every street”), it displays the combination of intimacy and distance, fever and calm, that is such a feature of Fisher’s writing.
Still suspecting there may be nothing more to itself
than optical tricks and water vapour
it works even harder to be remembered,
colouring its sunsets with particles
from all the barbecues and crematoria of the North.
