Fisher was Born in Handsworth, Birmingham and studied at the University of Birmingham. His early work, including City (1962), a work in which he applies the lessons of Williams' Paterson to the city of Birmingham, was admired in the United States but more or less ignored in his native country.
Fisher finally began to gain recognition in Britain with the publication of Poems 1955-1980 (1981). Between 1963 and 1971, he worked as Head of English and Drama at Bordesley College of Education. He then moved to the Department of American Studies at Keele University. He retired in 1982, after which he worked as a freelance writer and as a musician.
Fisher's more recent works include the long poem A Furnace (1986), Poems 1955-1987 (1988) and The Dow Low Drop (1996).
External links
Roy Fisher at West Midlands Literary Heritage (http://www3.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/fisher.htm)
An interview with Roy Fisher (http://jacketmagazine.com/01/fisher-iv.html)
An essay on Fisher by Marjorie Perloff (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/articles/fisher.html)
Fisher’s poetry has become less formally unpredictable since the mid-1970s: he no longer uses prose, preferring a tightly marshalled free verse, and the urban surrealism of a book like City is replaced by a more straightforward discursive or loco-descriptive verse.
One aspect of this modernism is exemplified in Fisher’s hostility in the poem to a debased rationality which enforces clear and authoritative distinctions, whether in the realms of politics or Christianity: Fisher’s poem instead prefers to blur distinctions, in particular that between the living and the dead.
Fisher writes as one whose wonder has been awakened by subatomic particles and multi-dimensionality, much as a Christian poet’s would be by angels or the incarnation.
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