Inhoudsopgave:|
When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had âstarted writing like madâ and produced âa sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizenâ 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 âBirmingham is what I think with.â This âmélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,â as he called it, was written âso as to be able to have a look at myself \u0026 see what I think.â All that was known of this work before Fisherâs death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that â never otherwise published â 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 poetâs literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisherâs signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poetâs archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction.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 Fisherâs own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon Englandâs industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century. |
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