Roy Fisher's Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010)

The afterlife back then

was fairly long:

nothing demented like for ever,

nothing military.

from "The Afterlife"

Pass by the threat and it goes back nearer Nature: the three old horses that always amble in the boggy roadside fields have criss-crossed the bluff, growing bigger all the while. They've arranged themselves on the naked steps of the summit and stand there asleep as a single conjoined thing against the sky waiting for the enormous moon to land and take them up.

*

Odours

of shellfish and salmon rising from marble

counters in the pomp of the market

defer to the palms ranged above. Masque

in the Aquarium tank breasting the view

floor up to roof where the skirts

swish through the murk and sharks

ride up and pass

'Sunday 6.30 Rev. Handel Broadbent

IF I BE LIFTED UP'

Indeed. If so he be. The phut and fall

of a late firework.

from "On the Wellingtonias at Pilleth"

[Here you will have to long for the exquisite 6-line elegy, "On Hearing I'd Outlived My Son the Linguist," or buy the book.]

My mood,

my garden: outline and ooze.

from "Shocking Pink"

Quite possibly I love the old cat

more than I love my thoughts. A private matter.

from "Of the Qualities"

It's plain. The rule

and the example.

In from the world and all its directions

the rule must fall and there lie

shining alone.

*

But there's a force that starts to curve as it gathers and says

MOVE

War and energy. Peace with revolutions

under the floorboards. Go looking.

from "Hole, Horse and Hellbox:

the Tabernacle Poems"

[More whole short poems would go here if I was going to fly in the face of copyright: "Plot," "A Damp Night," "The Skyline in the Wall Mirror"....]

It's as if some sunny splendour has not long since passed through this room and the passage beyond with the power to life the air and move, while the cartons and packing cases maintain an oppressive inertia bordering on menace.

from "Stops and Stations"

Peeling the present off the past

the better to show the wiring

*

rattling a cart of knocked-up planks

its bottom littered with research papers

on land use in the Fertile Crescent,

pamphlets, a Herodotus:

news of the stolen world.

from "Rattle a Cart"

Standard Midland is, as of this posting, available from Foyle's Books for 30% off.

Roy Fisher's The Thing About Joe Sullivan: Poems 1971-1977

Into the purpose: or out.

There is only, without a tune.

timelessness of desire.

*

What's now only disproved

was once imagined.

first and last stanzas of "Timelessness of Desire"

The light is in the earth if anywhere. This is already the place where it was. We've hardly started, and I want to do it again.

last stanza of "At Once"

Beyond him

a dissolution of my darkness

into such forms

as live there in the space

beyond the clear image of an owl:

forms without image;

pointless to describe.

*

I saw what there was to write and I wrote it.

When it felt what I was doing, it lay down and died under me.

*

The kites are the best sort of gods,

mindless, but all style;

even their capriciousness,

however dominant,

not theirs at all.

*

The pilgrim disposition--

...

domestic to-ing and fro-ing

uncoiled and elongated 

in a dream of purpose.

*

Everything still along its level

except the middle zone, the harbour water,

turbulent with the sunlight

even in calm air.

"Diversions"

Instead there is blankness

and there is grace:

the insistence of the essential,

the sublime made lyrical

at the loss of what's forgotten.

last two stanzas of "Some Loss"

On a ground remarkable for lack of character, sweeps of direction form.

first stanza of "A Poem Not a Picture"

                                      I can

compare what I like to the salts,

to the pot, if there's a pot,

to the winter if there's a winter.

The salts I can compare

to anything there is.

Anything.

last two stanzas of "The Only Image"

If you're living

any decor

can make a wraith of you.

last stanza of "Corner"

                  --the turn

where here and there

change places, the moment

always a surprise: 

on an ordinary day a brief,

lightness, charm between realities;

on a good day, a break

life can flood in and fill.

*

Getting home--getting home somehow,

late, late and small.

*

The cemetery's a valley

of long grass set with marble,

separate as a sea.

*

the din compelling

but irrelevant

has the effect of a silence

*

Travesties of the world

come out of the fog

and rest on the boundary.

"Handsworth Liberties"

Whose is the body you

remember in yourself?

*

The light. The rain. The eye. The rainbow--

horizons form, random and inevitable as rainbows

over bright fields of change.

"Inscriptions for Bluebeard's Castle"

Horizons release skies. 

*

After a fair number of years the distasteful aspects of the whole business became inescapable. Our frustrations will die with us, their particular qualities unsuspected. Or we can make the concrete we're staring at start talking back.

"Rules and Ranges for Ian Tyson"

                             Even

love's not often a poem.

"Of the Empirical Self and For Me"

It was still the same sunless afternoon,

no north or south anywhere in the sky.

*

                                    Some things

are lying in wait in the world, 

walking about in the world,

happening when touched, as they must.

"Staffordshire Red"

"It Is Writing" by Roy Fisher

IT IS WRITING

Because it could do it well

the poem wants to glorify suffering.

I mistrust it.

I mistrust the poem in its hour of success,

a thing capable of being

tempted by ethics into the wonderful.

Roy Fisher

The Thing About Joe Sullivan: Poems 1971-1977 

(Carcanet, 1978)