The map of post-war British poetry is today very much denser and more various than it appeared a decade ago, when the so-called "Movement" poets seemed to dominate the 1950s and Ted Hughes and the "Mersey Beats" the 1960s…. [An] increasing response to other themes and emphases, together with a greater awareness of American poetry, has ensured that a long-neglected poet like Basil Bunting, and such near-contemporaries as Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill, are now seen as equally valuable practitioners of other modes. It is with these poets, who combine American technical influences with a content strongly English in its sense of locality and history, that Roy Fisher displays his closest affinities….

Where Fisher and Hill are alike is in their attitude to utterance itself: both expend much effort in order to crystallize thought and feeling into hard verbal constructs that resist paraphrase, and are extremely reluctant to...