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.
The “slakki” of Fisher’s title is glossed as: “A shallow depression among hills. Not much of a valley. A Slack.” Even in his uplands Fisher knows all about lying low, and has weathered his share of fallow periods down the decades. Nevertheless, the three sections of Slakki show admirably consistent quality for poems written so far apart. The new work of section one combines landscape studies and personal reckonings with memory. In “Signs and Signals” Fisher describes a first world war trench wall coming away in front of the poet’s father to reveal a German officer sitting upright, and “seeming / unharmed though dead”. Looking out over no man’s land, Lance-Corporal Fisher would, for light relief, send “sharp flashes of his heliograph / (…) over the filth for miles”.
Few writers have captured the changeable beauty of the English landscape with Fisher’s painterly know‑how. “It won’t rest,” he says of the overhead view in “Sky Work”:
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.
The sky “carves itself alive”, imprinting the transient on Fisher’s agile, responsive, quirky forms. Improving Williams, he finds that there are “No ideas / but in mixtures, suspensions, / conglomerates, slags / in variety”. It was too early for Merleau-Ponty to appear on the school syllabus, he notes in “1941”, but if ever a poet represented “a gaze at grips with the visible world”, as the French phenomenologist put it, it is Fisher.
Section two focuses on work form the early 60s and 70s, just after the publication of, respectively, City and Matrix. “Heroic Landscape” is a mock-classical nativity scene, while “Motion” and “The Discovery of Metre” find Fisher thinking about the nature of form. With “Two tongues in one mouth”, the poet strides towards “the multiplication / of fields”. Fisher shared a publisher in the 60s, Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press, with the American objectivist Lorine Niedecker, and in “Variations” he imbues his short lines with a gravity-defying quality reminiscent of Niedecker’s great sequence, “Paean to Place”.
Slakki’s third section returns us to Fisher’s beginnings, though to read “Division of Labour” (“I saw the dustmen drinking light / And the grey wagon of desiccation / crawl in the gutter like a blind dog”) is to be reminded of how consistent Fisher’s vision has been from the start. The collection ends with a thoughtful essay on the nature of neglect. His poems, Fisher disarmingly proclaims, have achieved exactly the level of recognition they require (“The neglect has been entirely mine”). Fisher has written satires on the status anxiety that is the permanent condition of British poetry, but the idea of a nourishing neglect, in which readers can enjoy his work with “the secret laugh of the world”, to quote his “Toyland”, seems fitting and correct.
Fisher has been well served by his editor here, Peter Robinson, whose 2010 mixum-gatherum An Unofficial Roy Fisher is also worth tracking down, though I regret the absence of the early poem “The Lemon Bride”. As an index of his poetic longevity, I note that his first full collection predates Bob Dylan’s first album by a year. Though he has little enough in common with Dylan, I can’t think of another poet whose books I have looked forward to with the same excitement a new Dylan album used to inspire. On the evidence of Slakki and Dylan’s latest offering, Fallen Angels, this comparison is very much slanted in Fisher’s favour. Long may this incomparable and visionary poet thrive.
