Roy Fisher

A Selection from City

 

 

City

 

 

On one of the steep slopes that rise towards the centre of the city all the buildiings have been destroyed within the past year: a whole district of the tall narrow houses that spilled around what were a hundred years ago outlying factories has gone. The streets remain, among the rough quadrilaterals of brick rubble, veering awkwardly towards one another through nothing; at night their rounded surfaces still shine under the irregularly-set gaslamps, and tonight they dully reflect also the yellowish flare, diffused and baleful, that hangs flat in the clouds a few hundered feet above the city's invisible heart. Occasional cars move cautiously across this waste, as if suspicious of the emptiness; there is little to seperate the roadways from what lies between them. Their tail-lights vanish slowly into the blocks of surrounding buildings, maybe a quarter of a mile from the middle of the desolation.

 

And what is it that lies betweeen these purposeless streets? There is not a whole brick, a foundation to stumble across, a drainpipe, a smashed fowlhouse; the entire place has been razed flat, dug over, and smoothed down again. The bald curve of the hillside shows quite clearly here, near its crown, where the brilliant road, stacked close on either side with warehouses and shops, runs out towards the west. Down below, the district that fills the hollow is impenetrably black. The streets there are so close and so twisted among their massive tenements that it is impossible to trace the line of a single one of them by its lights. The lamps that can be seen shine oddly, and at mysterious distances, as if they were in a marsh. Only the great flat-roofed factory shows clear by its bulk, stretching across three or four whole blocks just below the edge of the waste, with solid rows of lit windows.



 

 

copyright © roy fisher 1961 – present

(used by kind permission of bloodaxe books & the author)

 

Roy Fisher has written numerous books of poetry and his work has appeared in a wide variety of anthologies.

 

His most recent major publication ‘The Long and the Short of It : Poems 1955 -2005’ draws together much of his out of print work and covers the entire range of Fisher's career, from its beginnings in the 1950s, through the major texts of the 1960s and 1970s, through ‘City’, ‘The Ship's Orchestra’ and 'Wonders of Obligation' ‘A Furnace’, to later work beyond and is available from Bloodaxe Books.