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Interviews Through Time and Selected Prose by Roy Fisher. Shearsman Books, Lark Rise, Fore Street, Kentisbeare, Devon EX15 2AD. 148 pp.; £9.95.

   As the publicity blurb accompanying this book proclaims, Roy Fisher first came to notice in the early 1960s with his late-modernist long poem City, “a considerable landmark in post-war English poetry which, until that time, had tended to shy away from the twentieth century modernist tradition in a way that American poetry had not.” Fisher’s natural reticence, non-metropolitanism and cosmopolitan-modernist inspiration combined with a narrowing of the ambitions of English poetry from the early 1970s to push him back out of what little limelight he had enjoyed between City and his Collected Poems of 1968. With the postmodern-influenced interest in experiment in English poetry in the 1990s, however, Fisher’s work, mixing recognisable urban textures with the strategies of Duchamp and Cage, once again began to attract attention beyond the small press and experimental poetry circuit. A small flurry of activity around 1980, when ‘Tribe of Roy’ poets (John Ash, Peter Didsbury) appeared, had come to not much; but it was followed by A Furnace in 1986, displaying a more accessible side. Reassessments of his earlier books – The Thing About Joe Sullivan (1978), Matrix (1971) and the dense prose poems of The Cut Pages (1971; 1986) – duly started to appear. Birmingham River, his most relaxed and masterful collection, was published in 1994. Slightly dutiful critical attention from the likes of Ian Gregson was meanwhile paving the way for his recognition as something of a neglected Grand Old Man of English poetry on the occasion of Fisher’s seventieth birthday. That event, in 2000, was marked by news for the ear and The Thing About Roy Fisher, an unsentimental tribute volume and excellent collection of critical studies respectively, which celebrated Fisher’s life and work in comprehensive detail.

   Interviews Through Time, then, is in good company. Although it is less slickly produced than news for the ear, its close printed pages are almost as dense in critical meat as The Thing About Roy Fisher, and it is in some ways easier to enter than either. The editors are as unpushy as Fisher himself – their names appear nowhere, although Tony Frazer contributes a short introduction – but they manage to weave together the six most substantial interviews Fisher has conducted since 1975 to give a coherent, chronological self-account of the life and work. These are divided between sections headed “Beginnings”, “The Sixties: from City to Matrix”, “The Seventies: from Matrix to The Thing About Joe Sullivan” and “The Eighties and Nineties”, allowing life and works to be mapped illuminatingly against each other, while a bibliography compiled by Derek Slater shows that Fisher, often viewed as reclusive, has conducted as many as fourteen interviews since 1971 – a figure which perhaps says something about how, in the absence of much criticism, this fine and demanding poet was largely forced to explain himself. This entails some repetition, but not much. What there is largely results from the ‘Antebiography’, which no reader would cut; indeed, it is a necessary companion piece to another recent chunk of autobiographical prose, License My Roving Hands, in news for the ear. (Other prose pieces include a self-review, written at the request of Rialto, which declared a “national disgrace” when The Dow Low Drop failed to attract reviews and the five fascinating ‘Talks for Words’ written for BBC Radio 3 in 1977).

   Yet if there is little repetition, there is, nevertheless, an air of massive consistency, matched by keen critical attention. While championed by the odd big name in the past – including Peter Porter and Donald Davie – Fisher now attracts the likes of Marjorie Perloff and John Lucas, as well as younger critics such as John Kerrigan and Ian Sansom. And while one would expect to find the likes of Peter Riley and Ric Caddel, among his fellow-poets, queuing up to pay tribute, Thom Gunn and Elaine Feinstein are less likely candidates. Their willingness testifies not simply to a wide appeal, but also, perhaps, to how easy it is to read Fisher partially. In some ways the fault – if fault it is – is Fisher’s, since ‘consistency’ in the usual sense is something he would reject; and one thing made clear by Interviews Through Time is that he has had more than his share of false starts, blocks and hesitations. For all that, his modesty is that of a writer who is absolutely sure of the rightness of the way he does things; it just so happens that his outsider’s way is experimental and analytical rather than mainstream empirical and discursive. In this, of course, it has seemed at times to resemble the music he played as a semi-professional jazz pianist for several decades in order to eke out an academic salary. Again, however, appearances are probably deceptive; Fisher is formalist rather than improvisatory, while his musical tastes are more Bix Biederbecke than John Coltrane. This comes across well in interview, where a good deal of control is in evidence along with the self-punishing candour, although both are leavened by his dry wit.

   Nevertheless, Fisher does open up in these interviews, if not in any confessional way. Here, for example, we have the bruising encounter with the education system at the age of five which was never quite overcome, and which may partly explain his lack of native Brummie expansiveness (Fisher several times makes the point that the unstable Birmingham accent and identity lend themselves to social chameleonism, but elides their brasher, entrepreneurial aspects). Then there is the near-terminal bout of pneumonia at twelve which was “a rite of passage, a Magic Mountain in miniature”, defining “the location of my imagination”, and the late adolescent conviction that he was doomed by “an unknown, virtually undetectable form of tuberculosis”. The extent of Fisher’s “life as a spy”, his withdrawn “spectral life” continued into early manhood, is probably exaggerated, but confirms the gothic trace in his work, as well as its unstable sense of selfhood and political unclubbability (“I’m deeply sceptical of that point of view [Arnoldthrough- Leavis-through-Raymond Williams] … on the whole you’ll find me to the left – or further out – than those people”).

   Such details also point to the spectator ab extra sense of detachment, which forecloses empathy, but – as Simon Jarvis has noted elsewhere – underscores Fisher’s willingness to face up to “the partially blocked experience of every lived subject under the cult of indifference” which is late capitalist society. The interviews, that is, show how the poetry relates to a larger social and cultural impasse, one which contemporaries such as Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison have articulated less haphazardly, yet not necessarily more profoundly. (In this reading, A Furnace is Fisher’s masterpiece not because of its relative accessibility, but rather because its form of parodic prayer reinstates the validity of “honest doubt” in the face of the material supernatural, the “secular Calvinism” of his parents, a witnessing in ghostly form of the inarticulated histories of the dead, but avoiding their incorporation into some narrative of poetic salvation.) If the incidental detail of the life is guarded by Fisher’s habitual reserve, then, that is ultimately more informative than mere biographical detail (much as one might regret his marriage and his two sons being covered in less than half a dozen sentences). Most crucially, these interviews reveal the processes of the mind of the poet at work – mildly self-obsessed, checked yet restlessly inventive, the “mimetic scepticism” and humour fully on display –making Interviews Through Time an essential addition to (and in no way a dilution of) a body of criticism which, unusually for the work of a living writer, contains little which is hagiographic and much which is of the very highest order.