Thinking with Birmingham as it exists

In Roy Fisher's first sustained success, the poetry and prose sequence City, there is constant interplay between an elaborate fictiveness and a denotative realism, but whenever that realism seems the easiest course, he often opts for those techniques of defamiliarization, which I have already established as a basic strategy of the British Poetry Revival. Indeed, City, published in 1961 by Migrant Press, though considerably revised in 1963, is one of its first flowerings.

City consists of 10 poems and 16 prose passages ranging from a paragraph to a page. If Fisher had yet to perfect his means – some of the poems owe to a lush lyricism not too distant from his own early New Apocalypse poems; others stray close to Movement paradigms – he had found his obsessive material: the city of Birmingham, a theme on which he continued to play variations well into the 1990s, a non-programmatic poetry of place. A sequence from Birmingham River (1994) opens, ‘Birmingham's what I think with’.

In the late 1950s Fisher returned to the city to find that it was being redeveloped partly because of wartime bomb damage, partly for purposes of social engineering; his own childhood memories made him realize ‘how much the place was dependent upon very evanescent, temporal, subjective renderings of it, which might never be rendered’. Poems related by theme are grouped together, though not in a logical sequence. The text is actually an assemblage of varieties of writing about the city, including fragments of abandoned novels. Towards the beginning there are many prose passages describing, from a bird's eye view, the physical contours of the city and its gradual demolition. Texts which refer to the city's short century of industrial development are placed together, while passages which are autobiographical and exhibit a pessimistic sensibility are generally found in what Fisher described as ‘a sort of well-written yearning towards the end’.