Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) £7.95
An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) £12.95
Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death. However, it’s not the skull beneath the skin he sees; it is the relationship we have with the dead in the transition of dying; what he elsewhere calls the ‘pass and return valve’ of death, and the ‘life of the dead’. This relationship is a celebratory one for Fisher, if couched in his usual dark and unflinching humour. Standard Midland opens with ‘The Afterlife’, in which the extended burial rites of prehistoric Britons are conflated with the funeral rites of Malagasies. Both refuse to leave the dead alone until all the natural processes have exacted their effect upon the body – and beyond, all in all, a rather squidgy business! But Fisher’s point is that we ignore these processes at our own peril. To do so is to remove ourselves from the complete spectrum of human experience; as he puts it at the end of ‘The Afterlife’, ‘The afterlife back then/was fairly long: nothing demented like for ever,//nothing military. The afterlife/would come to the party.’ Fisher implies that our relationship with Western religion has narrowed our attitude both to the body and death; that engagement with the processes of death and its aftermath are, literally, vital.
This engagement with death is also, as the above suggests, a relationship with ancestry; a relationship, he often seems to say, which is the real way into history. In ‘On the Wellingonias at Pilleth’, Fisher’s familiar tussling with the monuments to the past is rehearsed at the site of Owen Glyndwyr’s defeat of the English in 1402. For Fisher, such sites, often replete with Celtic animism, are locations where we reach through to the past via a living history. These places are haunted and haunting, the local river Lugg still carrying the spirits of those deaths; in Fisher’s writing, water is the great carrier of what we humans do. Water may be life giving, but, Fisher seems to suggest, humans have used it to carry off our detritus in every sense so its independence from us is as compromised as everything else in ‘nature’ is. At the end of the poem, in a familiar Fisher trope, it is the flowers that try ‘to settle the matter’ and provide us with both a view and a perspective. The wellingtonias are not a pathetic fallacy but at once, intimate and accepting.
In the second half of the volume is ‘Hole, Horse and Hellbox’; poems from another of Fisher’s collaborations with the artist Ronald King. These collaborations have often resulted in very beautiful ‘artist’s books’, combining both men’s wry takes on the world. The ‘Hole, Horse and Hellbox’ poems in this collection are no different. The short sequence here, starts off with Fisher’s riffing on the ‘begat’ sequences that occur in the Old Testament. This time it is through the jobs that Ronald King’s ancestors held before his own birth in Brazil. Part 2 of ‘Hole’ illustrates Fisher’s often dazzling wit, ‘Word gets about. Gets about in the town/wherever you can post it up. Cuts/flat, stamps flat, pads flat, stacks/and sells. Word lies down in rows then/stands up flat. Gets packed, travels/in pockets, in ledgers. In silence./One thing turns out to be leading straight/to another.’
Fisher’s control over the almost fugal movement in his writing shows no sign of diminishing. Published to coincide with his eightieth birthday, this is a lovely late volume and an ideal introduction to his work as a whole.
Shearsman Books have published a festschrift for Fisher’s eightieth. Called ‘An Unofficial Roy Fisher’, and edited by Peter Robinson, it contains new verse from Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, August Kleinzahler, Jeffrey Wainwright and others. There is also prose, including a very fine essay by Ralph Pite on water in Fisher’s writing, and a useful reprinting of Jeffrey Wainwright’s Stand review of Fisher’s Collected. The book begins with a selection of Fisher’s uncollected work from its early days to now. A fine book, immaculately edited and produced to Shearsman’s usual beautiful standard, it is an important addition to the slowly increasing body of work on one of English language poetry’s most important writers.
Ian Pople