Roy Fisher is perhaps the most important poet associated with the English counterculture which emerged in the early 1960s. He is consciously a provincial and has longstanding connections with the little-press movement; he is also a convinced modernist, influenced by both the European and the American avant-garde. "I can think best," he told Eric Mottram, "in a fairly radical position; the further I can take that, the better I work. At the same time, by temperament and upbringing and everything else I am extremely hidebound or timid.... I am very conscious, or have been very conscious, of things like class origin, extreme provincialism." He is unusual on the British scene not only for his modernist antirhetoric and his dislike of moralizing in poetry but also for his emphasis on the recording of the processes of perception, "the movements of the mind," which is the central concern of his...