['City' from Collected Poems can] be said to be a set of ways in which a responsive sensuous man fights off aristocratism in a levelling and mediocre environment…. What is so warmly present is Fisher's sense of responsible living possible for the artist who sees and whose eyes hold excitement for him, as he uses the technological and human environment, and, as McLuhan would say, makes it visible. (p. 13)

The penetrating mood of 'City' is not … nostalgia but of exploring for relevance to the business of living, working, loving, family….

The Ship's Orchestra is an assemblage, erotic and musical (Fisher's experience with bands and combos penetrates the work). The prose sentences and paragraphs belong to that kind of writing which varies its pitch and tone and cannot simply be called 'poetic prose' or some other such academic slotting. It is certainly a fine instrument…. Like listening to jazz changes, reading Ship's Orchestra you have to be alert to variants…. Ship's Orchestra is among other things a description of a way of life: that when the sound stops, the music dies and with it a part of the ongoing life of the band as men and women…. (p. 14)

Like 'City' the book is concerned with the dangers of finding meaning in an environment, of needing to have a larger inclusive meaning into which work and day-to-day living may be fitted…. (p. 15)

The space of the work is a music-less ship, with its maze of dark tubes and cul-de-sacs; the form of the work is the waking part of the sexual dream which merges with memories of childhood sexuality. The nightmare of endless and various pipes of connection, communication, organization, evacuation and intake becomes 'the system', a city in itself, out of Fisher's own necessity. Gradually the absence of music becomes the exploration of an absence of essential life—'breath music'. The artistes keep alive the frontiers of activity without actually playing; their instruments are an encumbering collection, fit for disposal, but at least this is not the land, at least the orchestra has a name and a position, at least they may be asked to play together. (p. 16)

The motif unity would be less absorbing if it were not for the startling sense of complete control in the language, the pacing of the cadences, and the timing of the passages coming on as one turns the pages. The interior emotions of 'City' are exposed here too: the ship is the city as dream of an environment which submits the body to a scattering of the nerves at the mercy of impression and other people. The work's unity has a profound urgency, therefore: an act against the conversion of energy into forms which deplete life. The orchestra may never be asked to play.

The nine 'Interiors' … included in Collected Poems, take the relationships of 'City' and The Ship's Orchestra down to intense, disturbing relationships of a man and woman, in pairs of poems…. Fisher returns to a constant theme: the possible insanity of allowing an hallucinatory vision of ordinary things and daily relationships to happen at all: the poet's sacrifice is uncertain of outcome. Compassion between man and woman is generated in the poems by the details of 'interior', which have … Robbe-Grillet's obsessive desire for accurate measurement of domestic objects. But here they are like life-savers. These are desperate poems, re-estimating married life, perhaps, and a rare subject for poetry…. Fisher has shed reminiscences of other poetry and a certain hovering between description and symbolism, and produced a long work unified with an economy of effect which still uses long-breathed cadences but has cleared up problems of 'modernistic' diction which lingered earlier. His forms and language are his own, with a meticulousness far from the slick magazine styles of contemporary British poetry. 'The Memorial Fountain', Fisher's most recent work in Collected Poems, is not acceptable style for editors. The eye details the urban-suburban without liberalism, like the eye of a man who has just returned from abroad or from incarcerating illness, or prison, startled to find itself registering this object next to that one…. No one has recorded the pressures of work inside an impersonalizing society as Fisher does in 'Seven Attempted Moves'…. His poetry's forms are the orders of a poet who shapes himself with pleasure in what resistance is necessary and possible while being part of community he does not want to lose. He spends a lot of time 'organizing against disastrous breakdowns' in his working life. His opinions are radical, non-ideological and against the authoritarianism of B.B.C., religion, literary punditry…. (pp. 17-18)