Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Roy Fisher on Location
- 2 ‘Menacing Works in my Isolation’: Early Pieces
- 3 TheWork of a Left-Handed Man
- 4 Osmotic Investigations and Mutant Poems: An Americanist Poetic
- 5 ‘Making Forms with Remarks’: The Prose
- 6 Cutting-Edge Poetics: Roy Fisher's ‘Language Book’
- 7 A Burning Monochrome: Fisher's Block
- 8 ‘The Secret Laugh of the World’
- 9 ‘Exhibiting Unpreparedness’: Self, World, and Poetry
- 10 ‘Coming into their Own’: Roy Fisher and John Cowper Powys
- 11 A Furnace and the Life of the Dead
- 12 Last Things
- Roy Fisher: A Bibliography
- Indexes
11 - A Furnace and the Life of the Dead
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Roy Fisher on Location
- 2 ‘Menacing Works in my Isolation’: Early Pieces
- 3 TheWork of a Left-Handed Man
- 4 Osmotic Investigations and Mutant Poems: An Americanist Poetic
- 5 ‘Making Forms with Remarks’: The Prose
- 6 Cutting-Edge Poetics: Roy Fisher's ‘Language Book’
- 7 A Burning Monochrome: Fisher's Block
- 8 ‘The Secret Laugh of the World’
- 9 ‘Exhibiting Unpreparedness’: Self, World, and Poetry
- 10 ‘Coming into their Own’: Roy Fisher and John Cowper Powys
- 11 A Furnace and the Life of the Dead
- 12 Last Things
- Roy Fisher: A Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
‘[T]here's a reference system like the blood or the lymph, that passes through the poem, which is various ways of treating death. There's an ongoing discussion of death … and the burial of the dead.’
At the risk of sounding capricious I want to begin this discussion of ‘the burial of the dead’ in Roy Fisher's A Furnace by referring to an ostensibly very different writer—the contemporary American poet Susan Howe. Howe opens her 1990 collection The Europe of Trusts with an autobiographical prose piece designed to orient the reader in her work, but which offers a fix on a much wider body of contemporary writing. The piece is entitled ‘THERE ARE NOT LEAVES ENOUGH TO CROWN TO COVER TO CROWN TO COVER’. Ostensibly, the title mourns the awful fact of bodies left unburied, uncovered; it expresses the desire to raise them up to hero status, to crown them with laurel leaves. Such anxiety or ambivalence as the title suggests seems to spring from an equivocation between the need to bury the dead, to lay them finally to rest, and the impulse to lift them up, to bestow recognition. As the line starts to repeat itself, however, other cracks begin to show. Is there relief that they remain uncovered, that there are traces left behind so that something remains almost visible? And have the dead escaped a fateful heroization? Put more strongly, is not crowning itself the ultimate covering?—for nothing robs the dead of their lives more effectively than absorption into a triumphal narrative. This is also a question about poetry, of course—the leaves are also the leaves of a book. There are not enough pages to do justice to the dead, to celebrate their heroism; there are not enough words to mourn them, to put them to rest. But again, to crown them with words would be to absorb them into the poet's own project, while to mourn would be to believe the dead can be buried and done with. Howe has expressed the wish to ‘tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate’. Yet she also states, ‘North Americans have tended to confuse human fate with their own salvation.
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- Information
- The Thing About Roy FisherCritical Studies, pp. 257 - 274Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000