Dates

• Existence: 11 June 1930 - 21 March 2017

Biography

Roy Fisher (1930-2017) was a key figure in the renewal of poetry in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. Born and raised in Handsworth, Birmingham, he followed a career as a teacher then lecturer in schools, colleges of further education, and Keele University. Fisher described poetry as his third art, having been an enthusiastic schoolboy painter and a semi-professional jazz pianist until disabled by a stroke in the mid-1990s. Yet it was poetry in which he built a sound reputation during the 1960s beginning with the first edition of his signature work City (Migrant Press, 1961). The Fulcrum Press volumes The Ship’s Orchestra (1966), Collected Poems 1968 (1969), Matrix (1971) and The Cut Pages (1971) established his credentials and resulted in his appearing in popular Penguin anthologies such as The Children of Albion edited by Michael Horowitz (1969), and British Poetry since 1945 edited by Edward Lucie-Smith (1970). The majority of his work from the following decade was gathered in The Thing about Joe Sullivan (1978). A second collected edition, Poems 1955-1980, appeared from Oxford University Press in 1980 and was followed by A Furnace (1986) and Birmingham River (1994). Bloodaxe Books then took over the publication of his work and continued to do so with The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems (1996), The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 (2005), Standard Midland (2010), Slakki: New and Neglected Poems edited by Peter Robinson (2016) and, posthumously, The Citizen and the making of City also edited by Peter Robinson (2022).

Beginning in the early 1970s, Fisher was a regular collaborator with visual artists, producing a series of texts, not all of them reprinted in his collections of poems, for limited-edition publications. He met Ian Tyson first, the founder of Tetrad Press, and through him worked with Derek Greaves and Tom Phillips, but his most significant contributions to artists' books came with Ron King’s Circle Press. Fisher and King collaborated on four major Cirle Press works: Bluebeard's Castle (1972), The Left-handed Punch (1986), Anansi Company (1992), and Tabernacle: Hole, Horse and Hell-box (2001) as well as six other smaller works, including The Half-Year Letters (1983), Ron King's innovative concertina pop-up alphabet book.

Found in 8 Collections and/or Records: