Reading Poems 1955–1980 took on the character of an eye-opener, and although there are still a good many poems in the book which are dead weight, others present an angle on poetry which has taken its bearings largely from American poets (like Williams, or the Black Mountain poets) whose influence on British writers waned during the confessional heyday, but which nonetheless … combines strong English and European elements to create something distinctive. (p. 112)

To describe Fisher's affinities is less of a service to the poet than to define his own strengths. He achieves unusually successful counterpoints in his sequences (some of them partly or completely in cadenced prose). Refusing to thrust himself into the foreground, he nevertheless conveys intense personal pleasure, or disappointment, or interest, or sourness, when contemplating landscapes or cityscapes or the actions happening in those landscapes and cities: the sense of direct involvement, to the point of passion, never throttles back. He makes clear but unpretentious statements on aesthetics, in which he does not shy away from reformulating truisms; in 'Releases', when he writes 'All structures are mysterious, however the explanation goes', he is re-asserting a tenet apparently simple and commonplace, but one which in fact encapsulates complexities for the writer with a conscience, the writer who wishes (as Fisher clearly does) to be honest. What is more, for all his seriousness Fisher is capable of hilarious wit, as in 'From the "Town Guide"'…. (p. 113)

Fisher's is very much a painter's perception, not only of colour, which he deploys carefully, but also of light…. Fisher's mannerism of intensity allows the poet to create patterns of words which paint in language what the eyes saw, at the same time leading the reader further into depths of shadow and light, foliage, grass and earth in the way Charles Tomlinson also does well. Only once in Poems 1955–1980 (in the description of the farm about halfway through 'Wonders of Obligation') does Fisher permit himself a landscape in any way romanticized (the verbs of shining and glowing, the holly hedges and ricks and swinging drays), and there he does so because the description is one recollected from childhood…. (pp. 113-14)

Insofar as Fisher's poems can also often be considered in terms of a passage cut through time, they can be looked at from the same angle as the musician's work. The more poetry abjures clear form, the concretions of linguistic space, the closer its meaning (for want of a better word) can be related to the actual act of progressing through time: that is, the following-on of line after line in continuous sequence. This is an aesthetic primarily American and European (not British), an aesthetic of pared-down primaries and poetic minimalism. To produce work of this type which has value not merely because it prods an experimental finger into traditional flab but also because it is quite simply a pleasure to read is a rare achievement, and I will not pretend that Fisher has managed it in all of his sequences (the 'Handsworth Liberties', for example, and 'Matrix' and 'The Six Deliberate Acts', and the prose pieces 'Stopped Frames and Set-pieces' and 'Metamorphoses', I consider to be failures). But in 'The Ship's Orchestra', 'Diversions' and 'Interiors with Various Figures' he has notched up successes, and in 'City' a masterpiece.

'City' scales down the pretensions of poetry; it mixes it with prose, too. It noses its way forward through simplicity and elegance, harshness and lyricism, dislocation and repetition, anger and sympathy, in a way which is compendious and wonderful. I suspect that someone more familiar with theory of harmony and counterpoint, someone, in fact, more at home in musical analysis than myself, would understand more clearly the structural principles of the work; it owes little to familiar principles in writing. There are, of course, poems in it which use rhyme, or metre, or echo effects, and there is prose in it urbanely dry and elliptical or surrealistic and crammed. More to the point, perhaps, 'City also says a lot … about the character, or lack of character, of the cities we live in, and it says a lot too that can be lifted out, if we wish, and taken to mean more, symbolically, than it seems to say; for there is a wealth of ideas expressed in its things…. It is in work like this that the full weight of Fisher's ability is perceived.

No poet has ever been judged only on his flat stuff if he has also written work as fine as 'City'. If Roy Fisher is to be judged by his best he deserves to be rated highly. (pp. 114-15)