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This innovative edition brings together previously lost material to chart the genesis of a key work in 20th-century Modernist poetry
When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction.
By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.
— Sean O'Brien
"City's subject matter is urban, the technique a blend of the surreal, expressionist, realist and cubist, the whole thing almost cinematic in its abrupt transitions and dislocations… Most of the lineaments of Fisher's mature work are present in City…a remarkable achievement for a writer in his twenties. He sets out to write about an actual city but to "dissolve" its particulars and make them strange, until it becomes as much an inner perceptual field as a post-industrial Midlands wasteland… There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more."
— August Kleinzahler
‘This new publication from Bloodaxe offers us a clear sense of the history and background to the writing of City, the poem that put Fisher’s work firmly in the frame of post-war contemporary British poetry: permanency and movement are central to a life’s work-in-progress.’
— Ian Brinton
'The Citizen and the Making of City adds significantly to the growing body of material on Roy Fisher’s poetry in which Peter Robinson has been a major presence. It is to be hoped that the opening of the archive at Sheffield University will encourage more scholars to engage critically with Fisher’s work.'
— Simon Collings
‘This manuscript was long believed lost, but has resurfaced in the Fisher archive at the University of Sheffield and is reproduced here with not one but four separate texts of City. The resulting volume is exhilarating and disorienting at once, leading us into the heart of the labyrinth only to culminate in an unfinished sentence… The maze may have more ways in now, but there is still no way out.’
— David Wheatley
'Peter Robinson’s book allows us to view the complete process of both composition and assemblage of what has been called Fisher’s ‘small epic’, the early masterpiece that is City, for this we are in Peter Robinson’s debt.'
— Ian Pople