Birmingham River

by Roy Fisher

'Birmingham's what I think with' : so begins 'Six Texts' for a documentary film about Roy Fisher, made by Tom Pickard in 1991. And 'a slow petty river' - two in fact - that merged and sank out of sight beneath industrialized Birmingham, now lends itself to become the title of this book of poems. 'Six Texts' develops subjects already made familiar in Fisher's earlier work, City (in Poems 1955-1987), and A Furnace (1986). Another commission, for Ronald King's artist's-book-with-puppets, Anansi Company, provides a contrasting group of poems, that give continued evidence of Fisher's anarchic pleasure in identifying the absurd, the self-important, and the politically hypocritical - themes that recur in other poems in this original collection.