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“... It’s always​ Roy Fisher who comes to mind when I consider the phenomenon of those who come to know a place, especially a city, through literature, photography, painting, film or music, or all of the above, and then collide with the fact of the place in real time. I wonder, then, whether the idea of the place, the imaginative site, is displaced by the so-called reality of buildings, cars, sidewalks, pedestrians, the particular light, or if the buildings, pedestrians and so on are made to accommodate the contours of the already present idea of the place ...”

“... Since the publication of Roy Fisher’s sequence City, in 1961, his work has been praised by fellow poets, but his refusal to strike marketable postures, during a period in which reaching an audience has increasingly depended on a poet’s willingness to do so, has kept him relatively unknown. This neglect is the more understandable given Fisher’s publication history ...”

“... book. If the reviewers fall idle, everybody drops dead; it’s as simple as that. Thus nudged by Roy Fisher, I hasten to welcome his Poems 1955-1980, which gathers all his published poems and prose poems. Until now, his work has been available (if at all) only from small presses. He has nonetheless acquired a substantial reputation, and the publication ...”

“... In a 1979 review of Roy Fisher’s collection of poems The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one ...”

“... as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a ...”

“... We will not find, on the one hand, poets such as J.H. Prynne and Iain Sinclair, or (apart from Roy Fisher) any of the poets collected in Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville’s 1987 anthology, A Various Art. Nor, at the other end of the spectrum, will we find poets such as Peter Robinson, Robert Wells or Clive Wilmer, or the Carcanet poets from the days ...”

“... work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen Fisher’s Place, Place was set largely south of the river, a nowhere defined by unnecessary particulars. Now Roy Fisher, he could do something with him – but the man had the poor taste to base his mythology on ...”

“... a more richly resourced language would necessarily distort the subject. Writing about the work of Roy Fisher in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, Donald Davie takes Fisher to be ‘restricting himself as self-denyingly as Larkin to the urbanised and industrialised landscapes of modern England’ and identifies a ...”

“... Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his ...”

“... which has room not only for Larkin, Betjeman, Auden and Housman but for Bunting, J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, and which takes time to confront the impact (‘in languages other than their own’) of Pasternak and Pound. With Davie, such words as ‘provincial’, ‘insular’, ‘tradition’ fight back against the pejorative connotations they have ...”

“... the 1960s was his campaign against Stuart Montgomery. Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press had published Roy Fisher, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Duncan and Lee Harwood, and seemed poised to become the publisher the British Poetry Revival of those years needed to counterbalance the waning radical commitments of the post-Eliot Faber list. Reprinting Finlay’s 1960 ...”

“... of either. There is, to be sure, the horror and camaraderie of trench life; but there’s also the Fisher King and the Golden Bough and a range of devices picked up from The Waste Land. There is, too, a large amount of history, particularly Dark Age history, combined with a host of idiosyncratic allusions. The seventh and final part, ‘The Five Unmistakable ...”

“... no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier study of the contemporary, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973)? In a book whose title claims centrality for Bunting, a writer who signally amalgamated Wordsworthian English Romanticism and ...”

“... three voices of the 16 in A Various Art to emerge most strongly have enjoyed critical sponsorship: Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne in Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson through her own theoretical book Poetic Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may ...”

“... the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be sequestered ...”