Birmingham as “Composite Monster”: Roy Fisher’s City (1961)

Abstract

Roy Fisher (1930–2017) was a major figure in British poetry, with a body of work which bridged the gap between mainstream and modernist writing. A significant artist of English urban space, Fisher’s work insistently returned to his exploration of Birmingham and the broader English landscape of the Midlands. While the city is a recurrent topic in Fisher’s writing, this discussion will single out his first significant publication, City, which appeared as a pamphlet in 1961 before being reworked substantially the following year. This sequence, or “long modernist poem,” gives sustained poetic attention to the alteration of Birmingham following the Second World War. The poem explores the experience of urban space and the tensions between authoritative and ground-level perspectives. These concerns can be fruitfully compared with preservationist discourses in English geography. Fisher seeks to create a unified whole of his native city’s fragments, but his modernist poetics continually interrogates and complicates this aim.