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Birmingham as “composite monster”: Roy Fisher’s city (1961)

Rogers, Samuel

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Authors

Sam Rogers Samuel.Rogers@uwe.ac.uk
Associate Director Literature, Linguistics & Creative Professional Writing



Contributors

Jeremy Tambling
Editor

Abstract

Roy Fisher (1930–2017) was a major figure in British poetry, with a body of work which bridged the gap between mainstream and modernist writing. A significant artist of English urban space, Fisher’s work insistently returned to his exploration of Birmingham and the broader English landscape of the Midlands. While the city is a recurrent topic in Fisher’s writing, this discussion will single out his first significant publication, City, which appeared as a pamphlet in 1961 before being reworked substantially the following year. This sequence, or “long modernist poem”, gives sustained poetic attention to the alteration of Birmingham following the Second World War. The poem explores the experience of urban space, and the tensions between authoritative and ground-level perspectives. These concerns can be fruitfully compares with preservationist discourses in English geography. Fisher seeks to create a unified whole of his native city’s fragments, but his modernist poetics continually interrogates and complicates this aim.

Citation

Rogers, S. (2021). Birmingham as “composite monster”: Roy Fisher’s city (1961). In J. Tambling (Ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_334-1

Acceptance Date Apr 30, 2021
Online Publication Date Nov 16, 2021
Publication Date 2021
Deposit Date Jul 14, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
Book Title The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies
ISBN 9783319624181
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_334-1
Keywords Poetry, British Poetry Revival, Birmingham, Roy Fisher, Modernism, Urban Studies
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7527012
Publisher URL https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319624181

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