#roy fisher

[victoriantomodern]

Moveable paper puppets from Roy Fisher and Ron King's book The Left-Handed Punch, 1986, Victoria & Albert Museum.

[tinkercreek]

Roy Fisher

From The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010 (2012)

[ukdamo]

Dusk

Roy Fisher - simple.complex.compelling.

The sun sets in a wall that holds the sky.

You’ll not be here long, maybe.

The window filled with reflections turns on its pivot;

beyond its edge the air goes on cold and deep; your hand feels it, or mine, or both; it’s the same air for ever.

Now reach across the dark.

Now touch the mountain.

[envirohistorynz]

"River Birmingham" - a powerful environmental history in a poem

This image courtesy of http://www.geograph.org.uk, has a caption that reads: The River Rea alongside Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham This section of the Rea is canalised, and has a walkway alongside that nobody uses, people preferring to walk through the park instead.

In my exploration of different ways of writing about our relationship with the environment, I embarked on a search for poems about…

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[theinvinciblespring]

'The Afterlife' by Roy Fisher

I’ve lived within half a mile of it

for twenty years. West

by the black iron weather-hen

half-strangled with clematis

on the garage roof

I can locate it. Past a low ridge

in the cliff face of a limestone dale

there’s a cave in the bushes.

  When the old tigers

were long since gone, leaving their

teeth, the valley people

would climb there with the dead

they thought most useful;

  push them well in,

  take them out again,

walk them around:

‘They’re coming! They’re coming’

              We Malagasies love

            our second burials.

            We hire a band that comes

            in a van. Again

            with liquefaction almost done

            we hold our cherished ones

            in our arms. From the grave-clothes

            they fall in gobbets as dog-food

            falls from the can. We wrap them

            in fresh dry linen. They

            bless our lives with their happiness.

  Walk them around the valley. Drop

here a finger

for the god that is a rat or a raven,

here a metatarsal

to set under the hearth for luck.

  And what was luck?

  The afterlife back then

was fairly long:

nothing demented like for ever,

  nothing military. The afterlife

would come to the party.

[czarinasrobertcarlyle-blog-blog]

HIDING BODIES

                                                HIDING BODIES

There's a body in the cellar

that needs buried

quick

before Dave gets back in town tomorrow

The stairwell is spattered blood brown,

he has been slumped over like that for almost

two stinking, stiffening days now

His eyes are open and fixed, his eyebrows query marks of confusion

both asking me what happened

and

blaming me, of course

An endless accusation that I cannot justify

but

Dave will still be home tomorrow

And Roy Fisher is still in the basement,

needing buried

quick

[commonly-blog-blog]

Because it could do it well the poem wants to glorify suffering. I mistrust it. I mistrust the poem in its hour of success, a thing capable of being tempted by ethics into the wonderful. -- Roy Fisher, "It Is Writing"

Roy Fisher, quoted in: British Poetry at Y2K - John Matthias

[marginalgloss]

the wind at night

'I have often felt myself to be vicious, in living so much by the eye, yet among so many people. I can be afraid that the egg of light through which I see these bodies might present itself as a keyhole. Yet I can find no sadism in the way I see them now. They are warm-fleshed, yet their shapes have the miniscule, remote morality of some mediaeval woodcut of the Expulsion: an eternally startled Adam, a permenantly bemused Eve. I see them as homunculi, moving privately each in a softly lit fruit in a nocturnal tree. I can consider without scorn or envy the well-found bedrooms I pass, walnut and rose-pink, altars of tidy, dark-haired women, bare-backed, wifely. Even in these I can see order.

'I come quite often now upon a sort of ecstacy, a rag of light blowing among the things I know, making me feel I am not the one for whom it was intended, that I have inadvertantly been looking through another's eyes and have seen what I cannot receive.

'I want to believe I live in a single world. That is why I am keeping my eyes at home while I can. The light keeps on separating the world like a table knife: it sweeps across what I see and suggests what I do not. The imaginary comes to me with as much force as the real, the remembered with as much force as the immediate. The countries on the map divide and pile up like ice floes: what is strange is that I feel no stress, no grating discomfort among the confusion, no loss; only a belief that I should not be here. I see the iron fences and the shallow ditches of the countryside the mild wind has travelled over. I cannot enter that countryside; nor can I escape it. I cannot join together the mild wind and the shallow ditches, I cannot lay the light accross the world and then watch it slide away. Each thought is at once translucent and icily capricious. A polytheism without gods.'

-- Roy Fisher, from City (1962)