Roy Fisher 1930-2017: a tribute & film of his last reading

I came late to the poetry of the great Roy Fisher. Early this century, my friend John Lucas persuaded him over to the Lowdham Poetry Festival, where, on a blustery day, under a tent, Roy read some of his poems and played a little piano (he was a fine Jazz pianist). Roy talked with my partner about their shared experience in teacher training and we were given his new and selected, The Dow Low Drop, the first of many books that Roy signed for us. A few years later, planning the Beeston International Poetry Festival, I suggested we try and get Roy to give a reading, though he didn’t get about much, being wheelchair-bound. His friend, the poet, Ann Atkinson was still alive then, and acted as chauffeur. Roy read with Matt Welton at the Flying Goose Café in Beeston. He began his set by establishing his bona fides, as he put it, with ‘Poetry Promise’. I filmed this poem and ‘Inner Voice’ for a facebook group. Last year, with his permission, I put both of these videos on YouTube. The quality’s not great, as they were taken with a Flip-camera, but this was the last reading that Roy gave and it was a lovely, packed event. I filmed all of the 13 minute second set that closed the evening. Today, in tribute to him, I’ve uploaded the whole thing. You can watch it above. That’s Ann Atkinson, sat to his right, and John Lucas on his left.

We visited Roy at his home near Buxton the summer before last. He didn’t get about much, but had plenty of friends who came to help, and was good company. I gave him a DVD with highlights of the many Jazz and Poetry evenings I’d filmed, which he would have enjoyed being at. He gave us a copy of An Easily Bewildered Child, his collected occasional prose. We would have gone again, but my partner became seriously ill, and now Roy’s gone. He died this week after, I’m told, slowly fading for a couple of weeks. I’d hoped to see him in the summer, and take a copy of the next issue of New Walk magazine. I’ve written a review essay called ‘Poetry and Old Age’, about Prynne, Ashbery and Roy’s final book Slakki: new and neglected poems. He had stopped writing by 2015 and there will be no more. It is to Peter Robinson’s great credit that this book came out.

Here’s a bit from that review:

These may be final poems, but there is no falling off in them, only an inevitably elegiac quality. The last new poem, ‘While There’s Still Time’, from 2014, threatens that the poet will return ‘in the form of a nut-brown silver banded bassoon.’ In its comic, confident conclusion, the great poet imagines himself being played ‘on the tarmac triangle/at the crook of Kentish Road’.

Make no mistake:

My voice will be heard once again,

and as never before.

I was pleased that Ian McMillan (one of Fisher’s biggest fans – Ian chose Roy’s collected poems as his book on Desert Island Discs) chose the same lines to cite in his review for The North. I’ll have to add another paragraph to my piece now. Not of mourning, but of celebration: for a sweet, sweet man, a fine jazz pianist, a true educator and poems that will last for as long as poetry is read. He had a life well lived and we’re lucky to have been around for some of the same time. R.I.P.