Reading Poems 1955–1980 took on the character of an eye-opener, and although there are still a good many poems in the book which are dead weight, others present an angle on poetry which has taken its bearings largely from American poets (like Williams, or the Black Mountain poets) whose influence on British writers waned during the confessional heyday, but which nonetheless … combines strong English and European elements to create something distinctive. (p. 112)

To describe Fisher's affinities is less of a service to the poet than to define his own strengths. He achieves unusually successful counterpoints in his sequences (some of them partly or completely in cadenced prose). Refusing to thrust himself into the foreground, he nevertheless conveys intense personal pleasure, or disappointment, or interest, or sourness, when contemplating landscapes or cityscapes or the actions happening in those landscapes and cities: the sense of direct involvement, to the point of...