The Long and the Short of It
Poems 1955-2010
This new expanded edition of "The Long and the Short of It" covers 55 years of Roy Fisher's poetry. Playing the language, pleasuring the imagination and teasing the senses, Fisher's witty, inventive and anarchic poetry has given lasting delight to his many dedicated readers for over half a century. Choosing this book on "Desert Island Discs", Ian McMillan praised Fisher as "Britain's greatest living poet". "The Long and the Short of It" draws on the entire range of Fisher's work, from its fraught beginnings in the 1950s through major texts of the 1960s and 1970s as "City", "The Ship's Orchestra" and 'Wonders of Obligation' to "A Furnace", his 1980s masterpiece, and and then the later work set in the scarred and beautiful North Midlands landscape where he has lived for the past 30 years, notably the Costa-shortlisted "Standard Midland" (2010), which has been added to this expanded edition.
Roy Fisher (1930-2017) published over 30 poetry books, and was the subject of numerous critical essays and several studies, including The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson and John Kerrigan (Liverpool University Press, 2000), and of The Unofficial Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books, 2010). He published four books with Bloodaxe. The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (1996) was superseded by his later retrospective, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 (2005), and followed by Standard Midland (2010), published on his 80th birthday, which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. An expanded edition, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010 – including Standard Midland – was published in 2012. His first US Selected Poems, edited by August Kleinzahler, was published by Flood Editions in 2011. His final collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems (2016) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Peter Robinson's edition, The Citizen and the Making of 'City' (Bloodaxe Books, 2022) includes Fisher's early, previously unpublished prose work 'The Citizen', the precursor of 'City', with all three versions of that later sequence. Born in Handsworth, Birmingham, he retired as Senior Lecturer in American Studies from Keele University in 1982. He was also a jazz musician, and lived in the Derbyshire Peak District in his later years.
