Readers of Fisher's Collected Poems might be forgiven for believing him to be a poet concerned with realism, albeit a realism used for his own ends. More recently, however, he has developed other aspects of his work and the industrial landscape whose presence was so overpowering in his earlier poems has now been assimilated…. [He has come] to believe that in the enumeration of 'realistic' detail there is as much exercise of subjective choice as in other kinds of artistic artifice. This is not of course an original idea; but it is one which he has arrived at in a peculiarly personal way.

The imagination which gave us such evocative detail in City was obsessed with the significance of physical reality. There was in City, as there still is in his more recent work, an intensity of perception and an insistence on the surface and detail of sensation which I initially connected with his defensiveness towards physical love—which he rejects for 'fear of being able to feel only vertically like a blind wall, or thickly, like the tyres of a bus'. The intensity would seem to be a direct result of sublimation…. Equally, we might see this intensity as a rationalization of the discomfort felt at living in an industrial landscape—a way of making this secondhand world interesting, and therefore bearable, to look at. He himself is not sure of his position vis-à-vis the physical, hence the ambivalence of such poems as 'Toyland' or 'As He Came Near Death'; he knows only that he wishes to perceive fully.

So he has set about formulating a grammar of sensory experience. The objections to lovers or environment, we find, are tangential to the real issues. It is the nature of human perception which denies us knowledge, however 'wary' we are to 'scent the manifold airs'. (pp. 125-26)

To be true to his perception he must show 'clarity and confusion' simultaneously. The structure and syntax of his poems has altered correspondingly; he has moved away from the poem which proposes a simple relation between phenomena and which progresses in a line towards a conclusion…. His method now is much more often to cover a 'field' than to make a progressive exposition. (p. 126)

Another correlative of his increasing interest in modes of perception is the change in his use of symbolic language. In his earlier work the symbolic value of the poem's images was brought about gradually as the poem progressed. 'The Poplars' for instance opens with a factual description; the image of the poplars then develops when he refers to the trees as 'lacunae of possibility' and finally he makes them a point of contrast for his state of mind…. There is in this poem, as in another of his rightly praised early poems, 'The Hospital in Winter', a simple metaphorical relation between external phenomena and state of mind. Many of the poems in The Thing About Joe Sullivan, and also in Matrix, however, develop the techniques that he was using only in the prose passages of City, that is, of fluctuating between the various levels of meaning that lie between the factual and the symbolic…. Indeed the outward references of these and other poems are diffused almost to the point of abstraction; pronouns, for example, which would normally refer back to a previous subject do not or, if they do, represent an image or idea so undefined as to be almost unidentifiable. The syntactic manipulation—particularly repetition of syntactic patterns at points of transition—that he used in the prose of City he is also now using in his free verse with great virtuosity…. The deliberate confusion of the reader is … counteracted by the constant attempt to register actual perception accurately; there are some poems, such as 'The Trace' and 'The Thing About Joe Sullivan', which are devoted solely to this. But, whether originally the cause or result of his beliefs, Fisher's emphasis on sensory detail has left him chronically uncertain of meaning…. And while he is exploring ways in which the meaning of language can be broken down to imitate the movements of the mind, he seems at the same time to have lost the impetus 'towards overt feeling' which gave his earlier work coherence and a wider frame of reference. Even the feeling that produced sarcasm has been pushed to one side; his satire is now largely (and entertainingly) concentrated in light verse.

He himself says that his poems are 'propositions or explorations rather than reactions to personal experience'; I feel that when he moves too far away from 'personal' experience into the area of perceptual problems even the symbolic value of his language may be lost in a diction too far removed from actuality to provide a frame of reference. In rejecting realism he sometimes forfeits reality as well. (pp. 126-28)