Roy Fisher poeta y pianista de jazz británico (Birmingham, 1939). Fue uno de los primeros escritores británicos que absorvió la poética de William Carlos Williams y los poetas del Black Mountain en la tradición poética inglesa. Fisher fue un precursor fundamental del renacimiento británico de la poesía. Estudió en la Universidad de Birmingham. De 1963 a 1982 estuvo vinculado a la educación.Aficionado a la jardinería.
BIBLIOGRAFÍA:
City (1961)
The Memorial Fountain (1967)
The Thing about Joe Sullivan (1978)
Running Changes (1983)
A Furnace (1986)
Poems 1955–1987 (1981)
Birmingham River (1994).
Metamorphoses (1970)
The Cut Pages (1971)
The Dow Low Drop (1996)
The Long and the Short of It: Collected Poems (2005)
Standard Midland (2010)
POR QUÉ DEJARON DE CANTAR
Dejaron de cantar porque
recordaron por qué habían empezado
pararon porque
estaban cantando demasiado bien
cuando pararon aguardaban
un silencio que pudieran oír.
Si hubieran cantado durante más tiempo
la gente no habría sabido qué decir.
Pararon por el temor
a cantar para siempre.
Pararon porque vieron al mundo entumecido
volverse turbulento
lo vieron comenzar
a elaborar una pregunta.
Enseguida pararon de cantar
mientras quedaba tiempo.
(Traducción: Matías Serra Bradford)
WHY THEY STOPPED SINGING
They stopped singing because
they remembered why they had started
stopped because
they were singing too well
when they stopped they hoped for
a silence to listen into.
Had they sung longer
the people would not have known what to say.
They stopped from the fear
of singing for ever.
They stopped because they saw the rigid world
become troubled
saw it begin
composing a question.
Then they stopped singing
while there was time.
At night on the station platform . . .
At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em-
braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to
see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused
soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back,
to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en-
gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his
cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish
the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy-
nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic
thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and
complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav-
ily to the floor.
A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif-
fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face
and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance.
She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before
the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving
sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey-
white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young
man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You
could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens,
there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap-
idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines.
A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his
arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked
jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had
served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling-
ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no
attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that
made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police
seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought
down in the darkness.
In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited
that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies
fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse,
cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With
these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This
could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no
regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant
and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved
through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in
motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen.
In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw
at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur-
faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities,
trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling
across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with.
Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that
stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide
and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags,
cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the
Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping
along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue,
in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau-
tiful.
Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the
plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and
shaping heads, awakening eyes.
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Provision
The irritations of comfort—
I visit as they rebuild the house
from within: whitening, straightening,
bracing the chimney-breast edges
and forcing warmth, dryness
and windows with views into
the cottage below canal-level.
For yes, there’s a canal, bringing
cold reflections almost to the door,
and beyond it the main line to Manchester,
its grid of gantries pale
against the upland and the sky;
there’s a towpath pub, where the red-
haired old landlady
brings up the beer from the cellar slowly
in a jug: there’s a chapel
next door to the cottage, set up
with a false front and a real
boiler-house, and—
rest, my mind—nearby there’s
a small haulage contractor’s yard.
Everything’s turned up here, except
a certain complete cast-iron
housefront, preserved and pinned
to a blank wall in Ottawa.
This comfort
beckons. It won’t do. It beckons.
Driving steadily through rain in
a watertight car with the wipers going.
It won’t do. It beckons.
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The Afterlife
I’ve lived within half a mile of it
for twenty years. West
by the black iron weather-hen
half-strangled with clematis
on the garage roof
I can locate it. Past a low ridge
in the cliff face of a limestone dale
there’s a cave in the bushes.
When the old tigers
were long since gone, leaving their
teeth, the valley people
would climb there with the dead
they thought most useful;
push them well in,
take them out again,
walk them around:
‘They’re coming! They’re coming’
We Malagasies love
our second burials.
We hire a band that comes
in a van. Again
with liquefaction almost done
we hold our cherished ones
in our arms. From the grave-clothes
they fall in gobbets as dog-food
falls from the can. We wrap them
in fresh dry linen. They
bless our lives with their happiness.
Walk them around the valley. Drop
here a finger
for the god that is a rat or a raven,
here a metatarsal
to set under the hearth for luck.
And what was luck?
The afterlife back then
was fairly long:
nothing demented like for ever,
nothing military. The afterlife
would come to the party.
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