{"id":945,"date":"2010-07-08T10:40:42","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T09:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=945"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:58:39","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:58:39","slug":"roy-fisher-standard-midland-bloodaxe-books-795-an-unofficial-roy-fisher-ed-peter-robinson-shearsman-books-1295","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=945","title":{"rendered":"Two Books on Roy Fischer, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roy Fisher, Standard Midland<\/em> (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a37.95
\nAn Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) \u00a312.95<\/p>\n

Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death.\u00a0 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’.\u00a0\u00a0 This relationship is\u00a0 a celebratory one for Fisher, if couched in his usual dark and unflinching humour. Standard Midland <\/em>opens with ‘The Afterlife’, in which the extended\u00a0burial rites of prehistoric Britons are conflated with the funeral rites of Malagasies.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 But Fisher’s point is that we ignore these processes at our own peril.\u00a0 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:\u00a0 nothing demented like for ever,\/\/nothing military. The afterlife\/would come to the party.’\u00a0 Fisher implies that our relationship with Western religion has narrowed our attitude both to the body and death;\u00a0 that engagement with the processes of death and its aftermath are, literally, vital.<\/p>\n

This engagement with death is\u00a0also,\u00a0as the above suggests, a\u00a0relationship\u00a0with ancestry;\u00a0 a relationship, he often seems to say, which is the real way into history. In ‘On the Wellingonias at Pilleth’, Fisher’s\u00a0familiar tussling\u00a0with the monuments to the past is rehearsed at the site of Owen Glyndwyr’s defeat of the English in 1402.\u00a0 For Fisher, such sites, often replete with Celtic animism, are locations where we reach through to the past via a living history.\u00a0 These places are haunted and haunting, the local river Lugg still carrying the\u00a0spirits of those deaths;\u00a0 in Fisher’s writing, water is the great carrier of what we humans do.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0The wellingtonias are not\u00a0a pathetic fallacy but\u00a0at once,\u00a0intimate and accepting.<\/p>\n

In the second half of the volume is\u00a0 ‘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.\u00a0 The ‘Hole, Horse and Hellbox’ poems in this collection are no different.\u00a0 The short sequence here, starts off with Fisher’s riffing on the ‘begat’ sequences that occur in the Old Testament.\u00a0 This time it is through the jobs that Ronald King’s ancestors held before his own birth in Brazil.\u00a0 Part 2 of ‘Hole’ illustrates Fisher’s often dazzling wit, ‘Word gets about.\u00a0 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.’<\/p>\n

Fisher’s control over the almost fugal movement in his writing shows no sign of diminishing.\u00a0 Published to coincide with his eightieth birthday, this is a lovely late volume and an ideal introduction to his work as a whole.<\/p>\n

Shearsman Books have published a festschrift for Fisher’s eightieth.\u00a0 Called ‘An Unofficial Roy Fisher’, and edited by Peter Robinson,\u00a0it contains\u00a0new verse from Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, August Kleinzahler, Jeffrey Wainwright and others.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The book begins with a selection of Fisher’s uncollected work from its early days to now.\u00a0 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.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a37.95 An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) \u00a312.95 Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[51,216],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nTwo Books on Roy Fischer, 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=945\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Two Books on Roy Fischer, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a37.95 An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) \u00a312.95 Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death.\u00a0 However, it’s not the skull beneath the skin he sees; 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