Roy Fisher

Roy Fisher (11 June 1930 – 21 March 2017) was a British poet and jazz pianist. His poetry shows an openness to both European and American modernist influences, while remaining grounded in the experience of living in the English Midlands. Fisher has experimented with a wide range of styles throughout his career, largely working outside of the mainstream of post-war British poetry. He has been admired by poets and critics as diverse as Donald Davie, Eric Mottram, Marjorie Perloff, and Sean O’Brien.

Roy Fisher was born in June 1930 at 74 Kentish Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, the home into which his parents had moved in 1919 and where they lived until their deaths. His mother Emma was 39 at the time of Fisher’s birth. A sister and a brother preceded him. His father Walter Fisher was a craftsman in the jewellery trade, the family ‘poor and prudent’. His parents had no political or religious affiliations, but his father was a chorister at a local church. Fisher describes the landscape of his childhood as ‘ugly’, the industrial sprawl of Smethwick to the south of Handsworth a place of danger. The grimy cityscape, the bomb damage of the war, and the industrial decline of the post-war years were important influences on Fisher. But ‘something called Nature’ was also present early in his life, with excursions into the nearby countryside a regular aspect of family life.

Fisher went to Handsworth Grammar School. As a teenager he became interested in jazz and taught himself to play the piano. He was particularly influenced by a group of Chicago musicians including Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the pianist Joe Sullivan. By his late teens he was playing in public with local bands.

In 1948 he went to Birmingham University to read English. After graduating and qualifying as a teacher, he taught from 1953 at the grammar school in Newton Abbott, Devon, as part of a team engaged in a radical revision of English teaching methods. In the same year Fisher married artist Barbara Venables; they were to have two children. His son Ben (1963-2009) was Head of French at University of Bangor, and creator of one of the world's most popular narrow-gauge railway websites; his daughter Sukey (1959- ) is an award-winning screenwriter.

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