Roy Fisher

If you were to take the 907 bus from Sutton Coldfield into Birmingham city centre in the first few months of 2022, you would have found the journey fundamentally changing from week to week. It was on these bus rides, through the constant flux of a self-reconstructing city preparing for the Commonwealth Games, that I read Roy Fisher’s The Citizen and the Making of City. Edited by Peter Robinson, the edition opens with the original manuscript of ‘The Citizen’ and gathers various versions of City together with Fisher’s own commentary and other poems left in his estate.

Reproduced roughly sixty years after he ‘finished’ the unpublished manuscript that is the focal point of this publication, Fisher had earlier described ‘The Citizen’ in a letter to Gael Turnbull as a ‘sententious prose book’. For me, it is a vividly incomplete collage of documentary and fictionalised encounters with(in) the city of Birmingham. Conversational, fragmented, anxious, voyeuristic, detached yet consistently attentive, this strange manuscript would be foundational to Fisher’s poetics for years to come. Robinson outlines how ‘The Citizen’ influenced Fisher’s City (1961), Then Hallucinations: City II (1962), and the eventual republication of City (1969) by Fulcrum Press. Even with Robinson’s attentive introduction as a roadmap, The Citizen and the Making of City can present the reader with an embarrassment of riches. The overall effect of moving from one text to another is akin to Fisher’s own experience of Birmingham’s streets: it often feels ‘impossible to trace the line of a single one of them ...