Roy Fisher is a massive "presence" in English-language poetry; and perhaps a poet establishes himself in this way by being (verbally), with extreme accuracy, himself. But his self may take in greater or lesser swathes of what is around it. The more the self takes in, the more it is hard to sustain (verbally) without falling into the well-known forms of empty verbalism. Fisher has shown a long-term artist's dedication to acquiring the verbal means needed by his poetic self. It reminds me of Thoreau's, who had "travelled a great deal in Concord," and whose thick book on that narrow land has provided good meat for the world since to chew on.

I should like to start with some distinctions concerning one matter that Fisher's writing seems to be particularly concerned with: the "sense of order" in life and in art. My ideation may seem to him dangerously metaphysical; to me it is tentative, and probably based on aesthetics.

We arrange the world for our own sense of completeness, of "where we are." We are happy that Diana Vernon, forgotten for a dozen chapters, shall reappear at the end of Rob Roy: that ties up those threads. We like it when Sylvia Plath pulls a "sense of conclusion" out of matter that we know (really) doesn't lead to it. We are pleased that, at the end of the Divine Comedy, our hero shall "unscrew the inscrutable" by looking into a light whose contents he can't tell us about, which contains the form of the universe, and whose complexities (could we but hear about them) must surely resolve and tie up all the immense clockwork of Canto-count and bolge-location and relative turpitude that has been arranged in the poem foregoing. All these works are arranged thus openly, thus blatantly, so that we may get artistic "closure." This is also related to the kind of closure people are supposed to get when the person who murdered their daughter has his neck stretched, or when some ceremony, which is always in some indirect way a totemic re-enactment of something, "ties off" the ragged catastrophe of a Challenger or the accidental deaths of Russian submariners.

"Ragged" is what we don't want; the sense of the accidental is what has to be removed. We want the ends of poems to "tie up" (which means, almost always, somehow to allude to their beginnings). In the old days, we wanted the numbers of syllables to add up, too; not even the most wildly Romantic of bards was allowed a false pentameter. We want these things because they suggest the unraggedness that we would like our existence to be.

"Was it for this . . . ?" "Not for nothing . . ." ". . . at the going down of the sun" (it took a poet to invent that untruth) "we shall remember them." Monuments to RAF bomber crews allude to Icarus so that their deaths may not be one-offs — lost in a waste of one-off events in a therefore-random universe ("contingent," or "accidental" in the old sense) — but part of a pattern. That means things must have similarities in order to allow relationships, categories, organization. Art expends immense energy on creating them.

To know where you are is to know your relation to this, and that, and something else; and that must mean to know the relation of those things to each other; ultimately, to acquire an ability to work towards predicting the location of everything in relation to your own, given the time and effort of correlation. The time and effort is what we pay the publishers of Road Atlases for, and also the astronomers, who are busy trying to sort out the new kinds of signal that emanate (with troubling frequency) from Ur-space and to relate them to the disturbed patterns of the old.

Only, it seems to get more complicated. Our salaries to the scientists have rewarded us with a universe whose interrelations are harder to fathom than Newton's seemed to him when he compared his knowledge of "what is" to a man's standing on a beach before a limitless ocean. If I remember the parable.

Nevertheless, "We know nothing" is a silly position. We wouldn't even be able to get up in the morning if it were truly so. Roy Fisher's poetry seems to me to get profounder because, as the years pass, it reflects more rigorously the nature of those half-knowings with which we do know. In this, it reminds me of the progression of Wallace Stevens, who in his early days played with relatively simpler paradoxes of un-knowing, but later showed exact qualities of some of the ways in which we in fact (half-) know.

I should like to work on another paradox: that giving the real sense of not knowing, or half knowing, or of the formlessness of things, requires great skill in forming and great observation of forms. I think this is how Fisher has grown profounder: he lives and sees wider swathes than most, and labour with his verbal craft has enabled him to communicate them.

What is form, what is organized-ness? The boundary between thing and thing becomes difficult. In one of Fisher's recent poems, survivors place parents' ashes with piety beneath the patrimonial sod, but each step of the process is attended by the odd contiguities that we delete. On the way home, the ashes, "owl-size in their jars", have by accident of domestic timetable been

lifted up high on the greased, shining
hydraulic pillars under the workshop roof-lights,
closed in my grey-green car
while its rusted and burnt-out piping gets
yanked off and replaced . . .

And when bags and name-labels are consigned to the rubbish bin, of course,

each has still
a whisper of human dust that
clings to the plastic,
the boundary a mad
regress beyond the microscopic.

They're going again in a day or two:

to be in part twice-burned
in city flames; eight hundred
degrees of the lance-burner
under the oven's
brick arch, and then whatever
blast of the municipality
lifts the remainder haze clear of Sheffield
and over the North Sea.

There is a sort of magnificence in this ending too, but profoundly arbitrary according to our usual sense of how things ought to be: a municipal rocket fires the old folks into a God's-eye orbit of the world they had lived in.

Fisher's centre is what has not been centred by the hierarchies that we need to "form" our lives. He is drawn to what we pass over as the wash, the float, the void:

Borne constantly over to one side, to the shelter
not of primary buildings — opera-house, cathedral,
law-palace, prison — but of the blankness of the
bare ground artists didn't render by more than a
wash and a few spacing figures who rummage there
or float, as the sun goes down and pediments shove
shadows.

But to be (in practice, for us) formless, what environs us does not have to be a fine-milled uniform soup. In 'The Dow Low Drop', Fisher imagines a new Creation Myth. In it, what he is going to make his "nothing" — Cosmos out of is already finely differentiated, like Carrara marble:

harvested, woven, bleached . . .
Or chosen for pallor in the ground,
quarried, sawn into straight
sheets, polished

That is how things are: however far "down" we go, there is organization. But it is another paradox that what is extremely "formed," — has to an extreme degree the differentiation that comes from being born of one time, one place — re-becomes bits of the Sargasso Sea as soon as it is taken out of its supportive context. When time is slit open

                         Almost
everything that tumbles out
is furniture and the like, lived with
but not digested: sideboard,
ironing tackle, things for the kitchen
that match, air-fresheners, seersucker
sheets . . .

— all the paraphernalia of our suburban purposes, unlocated and thus in inverted commas, become comedy.

A writer cannot reflect those incongruities, those essential disorders, unless he sees the qualities of things in the first place, since it is those qualities that make up the oddness. He absolutely requires the ability to evoke the this, not-that, to get anywhere with this antimetaphysic. In this section of 'It Follows That' there's a "gap" in the presence/non-presence of the sun: a sense of illusion that cuts away our base in reality, though deftly noticed:

What's
been the sun, sliding all day
unseen above the cloud-lid,
gleams without form from a gap
at the horizon; gleams
a long while, picking up water.

Yet the sense of a certain kind of day, a certain kind of light here, is as sharp as anything in Wordsworth. Without it, this illusion would be a mere "idea." This is not a clever play with ideas, but a play with experience, as real as in Donne's cries, or Rochester's 'On Nothing'.

The same applies to the art of the (socially) verbal. The most local phrase is the most formed, requiring all sorts of social formation to become what it is and to be understood: "she walks the dog"; "he's walking Uncle Eddie." When dislocated, with its context crumbled away, it becomes pointless, a joke, another bit of the flotsam, the void. In Fisher's parody-Creation, Aphrodite

raises the dead and
walks them for a while
without explaining.

Deftly, lightly as this goes, one cannot write this way (one can't create those incongruities) without a vast latent vocabulary of verbalisms noticed—dialect, idiolect, social inanity. These are resources Fisher's years of being his un-narrow self have developed.

In 'It Follows That', the ivory god System drives the speaker, hunting him out even in sleep. But the last section seems to be about the pleasure of "learning" some new place to be—privately, in one's own quirky way, like a spy. Likewise in the first section, he seems safe in the idyll of the here-and-now: there are no badgerings of thought about actual or desirable relations to other loci, other times, or what might or should have been. But section 11 says

In brooding,
balance, pleasure,
power.

In contemplation, perhaps, things do what you want them to. That might be the effect of the opening part of "A Furnace": the world is my world, the world is what I see, I am happy to watch its inconsistencies and collisions as it approaches me, centring at the top of the double-decker I'm travelling on. In any case, Fisher's whole poetic seems posited on the assumption that the personal is the foundation of any truth: you must start from what you yourself really know. A hard truth for all writers. It goes on to an inescapable responsibility towards that truth:

                        Brooding is voiceless
image stored with no bodily
trace; recoverable only by
strenuous and dense
translation.

You "translate" that insubstantial (and not necessarily even visual) image into the precise collocation of "things" (as Fisher's elder, Basil Bunting, would have insisted) that will somehow suggest to your reader the preciseness that the image began as. There lies the work, and there also the honesty, or the lack of it.

Hence — from this sharp sense of honesty to what has been perceived—Fisher's disgust for the usual empty verbalisms.

The world is the speaker's world, the world is what he sees; he is happy to watch its inconsistencies. He may be less happy, despite the comedy, to watch the mess those get into who would adjust its odd plans and relations so that they fit better — by means of their "social" untruths. 'The Dow Low Drop' evokes the wraith of a schoolmate who

Died at fifteen, in his delight
alone in the house,
clothes-line over the banister,
mother's underwear . . .
                       The censors of the day
comforted the boys with suicide,
impatience, despair, tragedy. Said
nothing about the underwear.

The speaker of Fisher's poems is certainly less happy to watch the wars people "design" for the sake of some grand scheme of propaganda, always suspiciously neat like the frame of the "bizarre/ system of dates the Christians have . . ." ('Hand-Me-Downs'). And this brings in the matter of a wonderful diptych called "On the Neglect of Figure Composition," dating back to 1984, which is worth dwelling on because it shows that a predisposition towards personal truth in no way precludes an observation of political reality; rather, it should foster it.

I was once confronted with a graduate class in Japan who thought Gulliver's Travels was just a children's book, and I found myself impotently trying to collocate instances where modern political climbers were doing "exactly the same thing" as the courtiers as the court of Lilliput. But the point of allegorical satire is the swiftness of it: the sudden grotesque collocation in one's head. Any attempt to tell the reader what he does not already know destroys that speed. Yet if there were not that kind of "applicability" in Swift to the life we know, he would be pointless, except for antiquarians.

Fisher's poem takes it as read that the causes of war are replaceable. Any cause will do; the conflict itself is the thing that people use to make purpose for their lives. So he dreams up a new war, for a new Matter of Britain. The nearest model seems to be the Civil War; the protagonists will be Ianists and Zoggists. And he sketches 'The First Exhibition of the New Heroic Art,' for this art will be the real point of the affair for the protagonists. It will show how they see themselves; what they feel the war is for — for this exercise in self-exhibition; and what the war is. For clearly they have no other sense of its reality. As Frederic Remington's strutting cowboys on canvas both justified and constituted the Conquest of the West, for Americans of his day: so this art, the new War.

Posing is all:

Diptych: 'Members of an Ianist Cell Brushing their Crests/ Appraising One Another's Crests'

Since posing is what it is about, and since no more inherent or necessary cause is ever hinted at, the more elevated are the associations that are brought in to justify it, the dafter it becomes:

'The Spirit of Queen Geraldine, Borne on a Cloud, Encourages Flagging Zoggists . . .'

But this is not a whit dafter or more kitschy than the Titianesque inflatable Milton mythology that populates art galleries with the iconography of the English Civil War.

The most pointless conflict in European history? It would be hard to say. But the kitschiness of the art is integral to the politics. The role of the Lincolnshire airfields in the Second World War is seen by the participants as those oil paintings of Lancaster bombers in sunbursts, which you can buy from tourist bookshops on the Steep in Lincoln. And which, intentionally or not, Fisher catches perfectly:

'Ianists Driving Randomly-Coloured Ford Escorts in Formation on the A1 near Peterborough on a Fine April Morning'

(Note the Escorts: what perception of 70s suburban dignity was necessary for that collocation.)

Chocolate-box art: perfectly unconscious of incongruity between style and content. Likewise the official art of all times, from Soviet Realism to the heightened George W. Bush that we now get on the front cover of Time. And that brings us to the war of the moment.

I do not claim that Fisher's antimetaphysics is either right or wrong; metaphysics is a fog I lost myself in a long time ago. I claim, with Ezra Pound, that the writer's first job is to "give us his world," and that this world somehow centres on the self. That centre Fisher has retained his grip on, and the world it leads into, unfalsified, is of no mean dimensions.

Copyright © Peter Makin, 2006.

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Peter Makin grew up in Lincolnshire, and was educated in London (with Eric Mottram). He lives in Japan, where he teaches and writes (Pound's Cantos: Johns Hopkins U.P.; Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse: OUP; [ed.] Basil Bunting on Poetry: Johns Hopkins U.P.). His poems have appeared in previous issues.