When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography, ’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’ All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher’s most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.
Circa l’autore
Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953. He has published many books of poetry, for one of which he was awarded the Cheltenham Prize. Others include Selected Poems (2003), The Look of Goodbye (2008), Collected Poems 1976-2017 (Shearsman, 2017), Ravishing Europa (Worple Press, 2019), and Bonjour Mr Inshaw (Two Rivers Press, 2020). His translations from Italian include Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (2006) and The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007), for which he was awarded the John Florio Prize in 2008. Among his volumes of literary criticism are Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (2002), Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (2005) and Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010). He is the editor of An Unofficial Roy Fisher (Shearsman, 2010), Bernard Spencer’s Complete Poems, Translations and Selected Prose (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), Roy Fisher’s Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and Roy Fisher’s The Citizen and the Making of ‘City’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2022). His translations of Poems by Antonia Pozzi was published by One World Classics in 2011. He is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.
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