Roy Fisher: Interviews Through Time, and Selected Prose
Published 2000
Paperback, 148pp, A5, £9.95/$14
ISBN 0907562269
Excerpts from several interviews conducted throughout the author's career and spliced together to form a coherent narrative of his development and his aesthetic. The book also includes an autobiographical piece on Fisher's early years as well as other short prose pieces that are otherwise unobtainable. Essential to an understanding of Roy Fisher's work as a poet. Click here to read Tony Frazer's Introduction to the book.
"The best introductory guide to Fisher's writing is surely Interviews Through Time, and Selected Prose: Fisher is a sharp and edgy commentator on his own work, and provides enough information on each phase of his writing for patterns and strategies to emerge, with enough vacillation and deference to avoid authoritative interpretations." (Devin Johnston, Notre Dame Review)
"...these interviews reveal the processes of the mind of the poet at work – mildly self-obsessed, checked yet restlessly inventive, the "mimetic scepticism" and humour fully on display – making Interviews Through Time an essential addition to (and in no way a dilution of) a body of criticism which, unusually for the work of a living writer, contains little which is hagiographic and much which is of the very highest order." (John Goodby, Acumen)
"[The book] invites the reader into a congenial conversation with Fisher where the themes considered academically in The Thing About Roy Fisher – de-Anglicising England, the provincial perspective, Birmingham, jazz, the anarchic distaste for system – are treated discursively. The honesty, humour, modesty and lack of pretension revealed in the interviews also reveal why Fisher's admirers and friends remain so loyal." (Arthur Aughey, Thumbscrew)
"Roy Fisher's talk is a valuable companion to his poetry, but even in isolation Interviews Through Time makes an excellent read, a fine view of someone handling his topographical and intellectual circumstances with honesty and insight in a largely self-made vocabulary. It divides his career into four sections and some of the long later interviews are cut up and sectioned according to which period is under discussion, which works well, especially as the various interviewers make different demands so we get varying perspectives over the same events." (Peter Riley, Poetry Quarterly Review)
"It should point a growing number of readers towards Fisher's inventive, unusual work: experiment without being pretentious, serious without being dull, funny without obviousness. All this is rather rare..... The editing throughout is efficient and user-friendly." (Alexis Lykiard, Orbis)
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