Roy Fisher: June 11, 1930 - March 21, 2017
Davie, Fisher & Tomlinson
It has become an accepted fact that Roy Fisher was less than happy with Donald Davie’s inclusion of a chapter on his work in the 1973 book Thomas Hardy and British Poetry where the English critic compared Fisher’s work with that of Philip Larkin; a comparison based essentially on their presentation of urban industrial backgrounds. In a paper read to The Powys Society Conference in 2007 Charles Lock suggested that the comparison was particularly odd given Davie’s interest in Pound and his celebration of the richness of the Poundian succession in the United States, “notably the poets of the Black Mountain school, while bemoaning the poverty of means and ambition of what in England was called The Movement”. In the year following his appraisal of Fisher, Donald Davie published his volume of poems The Shires and Fisher took perhaps a good-humoured sense of satisfaction in writing to Charles Tomlinson in November 1974:
It has become an accepted fact that Roy Fisher was less than happy with Donald Davie’s inclusion of a chapter on his work in the 1973 book Thomas Hardy and British Poetry where the English critic compared Fisher’s work with that of Philip Larkin; a comparison based essentially on their presentation of urban industrial backgrounds. In a paper read to The Powys Society Conference in 2007 Charles Lock suggested that the comparison was particularly odd given Davie’s interest in Pound and his celebration of the richness of the Poundian succession in the United States, “notably the poets of the Black Mountain school, while bemoaning the poverty of means and ambition of what in England was called The Movement”. In the year following his appraisal of Fisher, Donald Davie published his volume of poems The Shires and Fisher took perhaps a good-humoured sense of satisfaction in writing to Charles Tomlinson in November 1974:
I see we are both dedicatees in The Shires. I was at least born in my county, though I feel more kinship with the Staffordshire poem than with my part of Warwickshire; when I lived in its corner I always pointed North and West. When the poem was in draft I had occasion to tell Donald D. that Spaghetti Junction’s on the M6, not, as he first wrote, the M1; thus putting the criterion of topographical accuracy at odds with Absolute Music. Not much doubt about the outcome.
|
In Thomas Hardy and British Poetry Davie had referred to Roy Fisher’s publishers (Migrant Press, Tarasque Press, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Northern House and Fulcrum Press) and suggested that the names of these publishers held some significance:
|
Fisher has published with provincial and more or less fugitive presses, just as he has been printed for the most part only by magazines with a limited or specialized readership, far from the reputation-making centres of Oxford and Cambridge and London.
|
In October 1979 Fisher wrote again to Tomlinson to alert him to the fact that he was in the process of changing publishers from Carcanet “with whom I’d agreed to publish a collection comprising my old Fulcrum books and last year’s Joe Sullivan which they put out for me very briskly – and I’m taking a chance with Oxford”. The letter continues
Jacky Simms has been sounding keen to take me on for some time, so I’m hoping things will turn out peacefully. The deal sounds good: a Collected comprising three books of poems plus whatever of The Cut Pages I want to include; and a separate reprint of The Ship’s Orchestra, which is something I’m very pleased about. We’ll see.
|
When Fisher’s powerful and important book-length poem A Furnace appeared from Oxford in 1986 it was dedicated to John Cowper Powys and Fisher gave an address to The Powys Society at the annual conference held in August of that year at the University of East Anglia. Two thousand copies of A Furnace were printed in March 1986 and a further five hundred were printed in November. As if in riposte to Donald Davie’s comment about the “reputation-making centres of Oxford and Cambridge and London” Charles Lock reported in his 2007 address
It is regrettable that neither Fulcrum nor any other press devoted to handsome production was around to bring out A Furnace. For the first and only edition of a masterpiece, this, from Oxford, is a shabby effort, unstitched and almost palpably uncared for: the limitation page gives the author’s date of birth as 1926 (for 1930).
|
Roy Fisher’s letter to Tomlinson in 1979 concludes with a reference to “one effulgent summer evening” when he was giving a reading in the Liverpool Academy, “surrounded happily by your pictures and, embarrassedly, by four members of the public who seemed to have come to the wrong place”. I suspect that Charles Tomlinson, a poet much neglected in his home country, would have smiled at this as with a sense of recognition. He would have smiled more warmly at Fisher’s concluding statement:
Ian Brinton