{"id":10360,"date":"2019-02-20T21:19:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T20:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10360"},"modified":"2019-02-20T21:20:19","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T20:20:19","slug":"roy-fisher-a-furnace-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10360","title":{"rendered":"Roy Fisher | A Furnace<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roy Fisher | A Furnace<\/em> | Flood Editions: $15.95\/\u00a312.44<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Roy Fisher\u2019s A Furnace<\/em> first appeared in one of Oxford University Press\u2019s more elegant editions in 1986. It was, perhaps, Fisher\u2019s second great masterpiece after his first real appearance in print, the pamphlet, City<\/em>. It is a small pity that Fisher\u2019s reputation is often confined to these \u2018pocket epics\u2019, as Peter Barry has described them. When, on \u2018Desert Island Discs\u2019 Ian Macmillan chose Fisher\u2019s collected The Long and the Short of It<\/em> as his desert island book, he was paying tribute to the whole range of Fisher\u2019s writing; writing which ranges from \u2018laugh-out-loud\u2019 light verse such as \u2018The Poetry Promise\u2019 and \u2018Paraphrases\u2019, to the almost L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems such as \u2018107 Poems\u2019 and \u2018The Cut Pages\u2019, from the profound and delicate lyrics such as \u2018The Memorial Fountain\u2019 and \u2018After Working\u2019 to the surreal verse novel The Ship\u2019s Orchestra<\/em>. If City<\/em> and A Furnace<\/em> appear to loom large over this other poetry, it is testament to the way in which they encapsulate Fisher\u2019s genius; a genius not only of place, but also of a way of perceiving and writing about place, his unique phenomenology, a visionary, almost mystical, way of seeing and recording. <\/p>\n

As Peter Robinson notes, in his excellent introduction to this new edition, Fisher\u2019s method with A Furnace<\/em> was quite different to his usual, stated method of composition, which was \u2018an additive method in which each section is completed without any idea of where the work\u2019s next passage would come from.\u2019 A Furnace<\/em>, in contrast, was planned. For Fisher, planning a poem ran counter to his idea that a poem should not moralize, that the improvisatory nature of his writing would accumulate detail and precision and not state. As Robinson comments, these contradictions are, right from the beginning, \u2018characteristic tensions\u2019 in Fisher\u2019s poetry. City<\/em> describes a city, in this case Birmingham, in which many of the inhabitants live in abeyance to the \u2018authorities\u2019, \u2018When these people go into the town, the buses they travel in stop just before they reach it, in the sombre back streets behind the Town Hall and the great insurance offices.\u2019 Not only do these people not use cars, but the buses they travel in stop \u2018behind<\/u> the Town Hall and great insurance offices\u2019; the bland designation of \u2018the Town Hall\u2019 is metonymic of the authority which puts the bus stops away and behind, and \u2018the great insurance offices\u2019, which insure what exactly? Thus moralizing occurs in Fisher\u2019s writing despite his trying to avoid it. <\/p>\n

In A Furnace<\/em>, the decline of the city is, in part at least, the result of the way in which the city rose and the authorities which drove its rise. As Fisher puts it in A Furnace<\/em>, \u2018Once invented, the big city \/ believed it had a brain; Joe \/ Chamberlain\u2019s sense of the corporate \/ signalling to itself with millions of disposable \/ identity-cells, summary and tagged.\u2019 Such line endings are characteristic of what Maureen N. McClane calls, in her splendid back cover blurb, Fisher\u2019s \u2018unanticipatable yet always right prosody\u2019. Here the line break between \u2018Joe\u2019 and \u2018Chamberlain\u2019 emphasises both the cheeky informality of Chamberlain\u2019s first name, and also the fall onto the surname, which emphasises, in turn, the literal meaning of the word \u2018chamberlain\u2019, one of whose meanings the OED defines as \u2018the treasurer of a corporation.\u2019 If Fisher\u2019s \u2018millions of disposable \/ identity-cells, summary and tagged.\u2019 might seem a little broad brush to us now, it is perhaps because Fisher anticipated many of our current concerns about the big corporations and the class divide. If, for us, Facebook and Google are the faceless corporations bent on summarising and tagging us, for Fisher, growing up in pre- and post-war Birmingham, it was the city authorities who reified class divides through their bureaucracies, which, in the last resort, could not halt its decline. <\/p>\n

If Fisher\u2019s class and bureaucratic divides might feel a little \u2018of their time\u2019, his acute sense of an ahistorical and Heraclitean flux permeates the phenomenology I noted above. This Heraclitean flux is explicitly described in the Preface Fisher wrote for that original OUP edition, and which is reprinted towards the end of this new, Flood edition, \u2018A Furnace<\/em> is an engine devised, like a cauldron, or a still, or a blast-furnace, to invoke and assist natural processes of change; to persuade obstinate substances to alter their condition and show relativities which would otherwise remain hidden by their concreteness.\u2019 Fisher was never afraid of using such heavy-duty metaphors as a cauldron or a blast-furnace to describe the workings of his delicate, scrupulous writing. In the poem \u2018Talking to Cameras\u2019, he comments, \u2018Birmingham\u2019s what I think with \u2026As a means of thinking, it\u2019s a Brummagen \/ screwdriver. What that is, \/ is a medium-weight claw hammer \/ or something of the sort, employed \/ to drive a tapered woodscrew home \/ as if it were a nail.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Such metaphors illustrate the sense of sheer, physical involvement which Fisher shows in everything he writes; he is one of the most \u2018thingy\u2019 of our great contemporary poets. That \u2018thingy-ness\u2019 and flux animate his best writing to an almost obsessive degree, as he writes in towards the beginning of A Furnace<\/em>, \u2018Something\u2019s decided \/ to narrate \/ in more dimensions than I can know \/ the gathering in \/ and giving out of the world on a slow \/ pulse, on a metered contraction \/ that the senses enquire towards \/ but may not themselves \/ interrupt.\u2019 That \u2018something\u2019 is, as Fisher himself would put it, a place-holder, and, as I\u2019ve suggested, his poems are threaded through with a sense that reality has its own animations to which the poet and the poem must pay continual attention. Although he acknowledges the limits to his perceptions with that \u2018in more dimensions than I can know\u2019, Fisher more than almost any other contemporary poet, does, in that horribly cliched phrase, \u2018challenge us to be as alive and attentive to reality as he is.\u2019 <\/p>\n

The poem starts with the narrator riding on the top-deck of a bus as it rides through the suburbs of Birmingham. It ends with the life-affirming image of snails on fennel stalks, \u2018together and upward; \/ tight and seraphic.\u2019 In between, Fisher takes us deep into the history of post-war Birmingham, aspects of the Gawain legend, Celtic grave mounds in Spain, the final gigs of the great jazz saxophonist, Coleman Hawkins and much else. Flood\u2019s new edition of the poem has Robinson\u2019s important introduction, the text beautifully laid out on the page, Fisher\u2019s final notes to the poem, and some new and necessary notes of Robinson\u2019s which lay out some of the history which Fisher refers to. The book also includes, as an addendum, \u2018They Come Home\u2019, Fisher\u2019s beautiful elegy to the parents of his second wife, Joyce Holliday. This latter, Fisher suggested, could have been part of the final poem, although, even now, it seems like an addition, and not an inevitable part of that whole. As Peter Robinson notes, \u2018They Come Home\u2019 is perhaps the immaculate record of too raw an event for it to form part of the overall trajectory of the final text. But it is good to have it reprinted here, to suggest more of the deep humanity which animates Fisher\u2019s writing. <\/p>\n

This new Flood edition is a beautiful rendering of Fisher\u2019s greatest writing. Its clear, accessible font displays the careful pacing of Fisher\u2019s trajectory through the poems, and Peter Robinson\u2019s deft editing presents a poem which, as Maureen N. Mclane comments, is \u2018Perhaps the last great modernist poem\u2019 showing Fisher\u2019s \u2018unsentimental pathos [and] profound tenderness\u2019<\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roy Fisher | A Furnace | Flood Editions: $15.95\/\u00a312.44 Roy Fisher\u2019s A Furnace first appeared in one of Oxford University Press\u2019s more elegant editions in 1986. It was, perhaps, Fisher\u2019s second great masterpiece after his first real appearance in print, the pamphlet, City. It is a small pity that Fisher\u2019s reputation is often confined to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nRoy Fisher | A Furnace | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10360\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Roy Fisher | A Furnace | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Roy Fisher | A Furnace | Flood Editions: $15.95\/\u00a312.44 Roy Fisher\u2019s A Furnace first appeared in one of Oxford University Press\u2019s more elegant editions in 1986. 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