The first thing to say is that Fisher’s texts have never been as well served on the page as they are here. The poems are given real space and the movement of Fisher’s breath, rhythm and cadence is as clear as it possibly could be. Fisher has found a publisher who has finally done him proud, and that publisher happens to be American.
That said, the volume’s editor, August Kleinzahler has constructed a resolutely American Roy Fisher. In doing so, Kleinzahler has wrested away much of what makes Roy Fisher’s poems very, very English. The most important loss is Fisher’s very dry, very English irony. Fisher’s light verse satires, often, but not only, on the poetry business itself, are totally absent from this book. Another absence from this book is much of Fisher’s engagement with the British and European landscape – from ossuaries in Brittany to the landscapes of the English Midlands. And engagement with landscape and nature is also part of Fishers’ intimate relation with British and European romanticism. What Kleinzahler shows, perhaps for the first time, is how Fisher uses the American poetic line, and how Fisher’s eschewal of the regular stanza gives his writing such a transatlantic feel.
Kleinzahler selects a number of Fisher’s poems about jazz musicians, largely but not exclusively American players; a selection that evidently mirrors one of Kleinzahler’s own interests. What Kleinzahler suggests in this is how Fisher’s aesthetic and poetic has, in part, emerged from his detailed, almost obsessive listening to the American piano style that emerged from Chicago and New Orleans in the thirties; and how that poetic returns again and again to engagement with both precision and ornamentation.
Kleinzahler selects most of the important pieces from the early middle period of Fisher’s writing: ‘After Working’, ‘For Realism’, ‘The Memorial Fountain’ and ‘Of the Empirical Self and Me’, as well as a generous selection from Fisher’s most recent book Standard Midland. He also includes strong selections from City, The Ship’s Orchestra and a slightly odd section from A Furnace, which Kleinzahler himself acknowledges to be Fisher’s masterpiece. In addition, Kleinzahler has included four pieces from Interiors with Various Figures, a book which is much undervalued in Fisher’s writing. Thus, the reader new to Fisher, and that may well be the American audience to which this book is oriented, will find a good, strong collection of Fisher’s work.
One final comment: in his introduction, Kleinzahler describes Fisher’s writing as ‘the voice denuded of personality and with all the warmth of a lens, exploratory, restless, difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm.’ That is simply not true. Fisher’s poetry appeals to both sides of the poetic divide in British poetry because for the avant-garde it is indeed, ‘exploratory, restless, difficult’, but for the ‘mainstream’ it has immense charm. Fisher is witty, warm and often laugh-out-loud funny. It is the sheer range of his writing which propels him to the top of a lot of people’s ‘must-read’ lists. Fisher is a very great poet, and, I suggest, won’t go away. Buy this book as an excellent, basic introduction to Fisher’s work and for its wonderful production values, then go to the collected, The Long and the Short of It, for the range of Fisher’s immense achievement.
Ian Pople