A Step Backwards

From the delicate, though uneven talent of Mr Fisher’s first book of verse, The Rain on the Water, there is a steep descent to the present book. The author’s misfortune has been to mistake strident social comment for poetry –

. . . the day they bashed my brains
to
pulp
that last day so full of living,
that day
they bashed my brains to pulp
outside
the Miners’ Hall
as we
defended our rights . . .

This extract from the title poem is by no means untypical of Mr Fisher’s present style. It is one thing to have political convictions; it is another to allow one’s imagination to be bound up in a doctrinal straitjacket. In a sense one could say that Mr Fisher is writing bad devotional verse. The paradise of working men to which he points is naïve to the point of absurdity –

page 481

Below the watchful hills
amid clover
and
apple trees
you work
like young vigorous bees
you
work together
pouring concrete . . .

In this poem Mr Fisher is saluting the inhabitants of Beeville. The catastrophic double meaning of ‘bees’ has escaped the author but can hardly escape the reader. One or two love poems, formless but evocative, remain outside the concrete mixer. In the hardening cement a poet lies imbedded.

1961 (262)