Readers of Fisher's Collected Poems might be forgiven for believing him to be a poet concerned with realism, albeit a realism used for his own ends. More recently, however, he has developed other aspects of his work and the industrial landscape whose presence was so overpowering in his earlier poems has now been assimilated…. [He has come] to believe that in the enumeration of 'realistic' detail there is as much exercise of subjective choice as in other kinds of artistic artifice. This is not of course an original idea; but it is one which he has arrived at in a peculiarly personal way.

The imagination which gave us such evocative detail in City was obsessed with the significance of physical reality. There was in City, as there still is in his more recent work, an intensity of perception and an insistence on the surface and detail of sensation...