TIMELESS
IDENTITIES
Roy Fisher: A
Furnace, Oxford University Press.
When Roy Fisher’s Poems 1955-1980 was published, it made available to a wider
audience a poetic enterprise of great importance that had hitherto been granted
only limited - often small press - circulation.
Suddenly, he achieved what the Americans call ‘visibility’ and he seems
to be following Basil Bunting as a re-discovered poet of unfashionable
difficulty and suspicious foreignness.
The comparison with Bunting
is pertinent: A Furnace, like Briggflatts, is a long poem of ambitious
scope, consisting of lyric passages arranged as sequences, employing a variety
of technical devices and free-verse styles.
In the marvellously evocative ‘Introit’ to the main poem, Fisher points
the reader back, both to his long work City
(1961), concerned with his native Birmingham, and to the defamiliarising poems
of the 1970s, the period of his perceptual ‘scratch ontology’.
Even in City, Birmingham had to be ‘made strange’ and hallucinatory, but
here Fisher is under no such compulsion, although characteristically
‘metaphors, riddles, resemblances’ are continually offered by the surface
aspects of things. But he has a more
questioning, less playful approach to the mystery of a perception
that keeps a time of its own,
made up from the long
discrete moments
of the stages of the street,
each bred off the last as if by
causality.
In earlier poems these ‘discrete moments’ and their
imaginative transformations had variously oppressed and delighted Fisher; in A Furnace they are subordinated to his
search for a validating - and not merely scratch - ontology. Metaphoric play no longer simply counterparts
the riddle of evanescent appearances, it enacts the quest for identification in
disparity. Fisher acknowledges the
ambivalence of this when he deploys his old trick of emptying the metaphor of
its tenor:
a stain in the plaster that so
resembles - and that body of air …
that’s like
nothing that ever was.
What had previously been the operation of an
individual post-Modernist imagination has become a universalised, Romantic
principle; Fisher notes, with approval, John Cowper Powys’s contention ‘that
the making of all kinds of identities is a primary impulse which the cosmos
itself has’. A Furnace attempts to reveal these ‘timeless identities / riding in
the flux’ by working on some of the moments at which they achieve personal or
historical ‘materialisation’ or ‘the coming into / … the guesswork of the
senses’. They can range from the
perceptual transformations implicit in a
skein of connections from
lichens to collapsed faces
in drenched walls
to the ancestral evidence of ‘William Fisher / age
ten years, occupation jeweller’ in nineteenth-century Birmingham. The continual comparison between, and
superimposition of, urban Birmingham and rural Staffordshire - which again,
owes much to Powys - suggests topographical transformation.
The familiar notion of the
‘palimpsest’ of succeeding settlements on one site is presented as though it
were a speeded up film (which accelerates at industrialisation), but Fisher
emphases discontinuities of culture.
Cultures are formed by the collision of active forces, not by their
collusion, and are entropic: ‘unstable, dividing, grouping again/differently’. This, combined with frequent evidence of
working class scepticism about civic authority in the ‘primordial’ lives of
ordinary people, ensures that there is no unifying vision of cultural identity,
no totalising myth. Romanticism’s flight
from industrialisation is turned back on itself and a mercurial ‘Nature’ is an
inescapable fact, ‘an imperative’, for the urban population.
The poem - though it has a
clear form and an elaborate plan - is heterogeneous and unhierarchical. Fisher’s attempts to encapsulate cultural
history do not always quite convince (nor does the occasional lapse into
ponderous diction that signals uncertain reverence). Fisher is working to extend his range in
this, his longest work in verse, only by working against the grain of his
sensibility. When a thought or a
movement of ideas is presented with the fidelity accorded to natural processes,
the writing is sparkingly brilliant; but inert fact and commentary undermine
the phenomenologist in Fisher. However,
at his best, a few of his lines can tersely present the balanced relation
between his new-found metaphysics and his view of cultural change.
Clarity
of the unmoving core
comes implacably out
through all that’s material:
walls of battleship scrap,
the raising up of Consett
along the skyline,
the taking of it down again.
March -April
1986 Times Literary Supplement, 20 June 1986
