A Furnace

Author: Roy Fisher

Publisher: Flood Editions (2018)

Edited and with an introduction by Peter Robinson. “Perhaps the last great modernist poem, Roy Fisher’s A Furnace offers an alternately brightening and thickening materialization of landscape, history, and thought. From its opening bus ride along industrial roads in Birmingham, England to its final image of snails creeping up fennel stalks, A Furnace is a surprising, prodigious, spiraling yet hewn work. Here it is as if Blake were crossed with William Carlos Williams: Fisher’s visionary, often jeremiac incandescence aligns with a Blakean poetics of the bounding line, the intensely seen and wrought, a metaphysics made material, forged in the cauldron of his own making. Yet Fisher’s commitment to particulars, to ‘no ideas but in things,’ to the interlocking logic of city, history, environment, and sensuous perception — not to mention his unanticipatable yet always right prosody—equally evoke Williams.