Birmingham’s what I think with.
It’s not made for that sort of job,
but it’s what they gave me.
As a means of thinking, it’s a Brummagem
screwdriver. What that is,
is a medium-weight claw hammer
or something of the sort, employed
to drive a tapered woodscrew home
as if it were a nail. . . .
The results come out mixed. It blunts
the screw-point, strains the shank,
bashes the head-slot flat. But
forced straight into the splitting wood,
it won’t wind loose, and it can’t
be twisted back out, even
if there’s enough slot left for the bit.
(‘Talking to Cameras’ 1991. Fisher 1994, 11)

2The bluntness with which this extended metaphor hammers home its point is part of the burlesque. But it belies the sophistication of Fisher’s earlier work, of which this deadpan overture might be read as a self-deprecating critique. In Fisher’s most influential topopoetic sequences, City (1961) and A Furnace (1986), it is often tricky for the non-local reader to get where Fisher is coming from. This is not to say that he has not found knowledgeable and insightful readers from outside the Midlands. Peter Robinson, Fisher’s greatest advocate, is the most obvious. Another is John Kerrigan, whose seminal analysis of Fisher’s tricky relationship with concepts like place and centrality in the article ‘Roy Fisher on Location’ (Kerrigan 16-46) has already covered much more ground than this one. I can in no way claim to know as much about Roy Fisher’s work, much less about topopoetics in postwar British literature, but I can claim—in terms of a visceral local recognition—I get where Fisher is coming from as well as anyone.

3I come from Birmingham. My first home was in Smethwick, about two miles from Fisher’s. I play a bit of jazz piano. I write poetry. My experiences of these things inevitably intertwine as I revisit Fisher’s work. The assertion of an authentic local identity is not something either of us would propound; quite the opposite—after all, brummagem is synonymous with inauthenticity (Trainor 2010), a fact of language that has proven oddly inspirational—nor is the assertion of identity politics in literary criticism. And yet, as this autobiographical paragraph shows, I cannot help but agree that:

There’s no shame
in letting the world pivot
on your own patch. That’s all a centre’s for.
Anything else is politics: how far
West Bromwich is from London,
Handsworth from Rome, Sun
from his galactic vortex;
. . . how far Clare
needed to walk
from High Beech back to Helpston.
Close by Apollo’s
abandoned incinerator-house at Delphi,
its columns giving the air of a ruined
ironworks in the mountains,
I’ve held my hands to the displaced
Omphalos-stone, the single centre,
not of the planet, but of the earth’s shifting
surface, the live map.
(‘Talking to Cameras’ 1991. Fisher 1994, 14)

4The temple of Apollo at Delphi—the place De Quincey describes as ‘turn[ing] out . . . in the very age of Sophocles such Birmingham hexameters as sometimes astonished Greece’ (De Quincey 220)—‘gives the air’ of a ruined ironworks, like the one at the bottom of Fisher’s old street. The distance between these two loci is ‘politics’: analogous to the long trek home of the Midland poet John Clare, after absconding from psychiatric care in Essex. There is a palpable ambivalence here towards the centrality of the place in which Fisher grew up: important not merely because it is ‘his own patch’, like Clare’s Helpston, but because it is supposed, by commonplace national geography and the history of the industrial revolution, to be intrinsically central. This leads to an existential modulation of the concept of the centre, from an inevitable pivot—at the heart of an array of centripetal metaphors—to an arbitrary point in a topological space: ‘the earth’s shifting / surface, the live map.’ A topological space, by dint of its definitive deformability, cannot have a fixed centre. Fisher, like many Brummies, cannot accept centrality in any simple way, and this tends to forge an eccentric concept of the poetic subject. The ruined ironworks, the locus of the displaced Omphalos-stone, has become an ironyworks: a factory ‘turning out’ language (to coin De Quincey’s metaphor) that is tonally and functionally de-centred.

5This eccentricity arguably derives from the geographical and historical indeterminacy of the West Midlands, which, for complex sociopolitical reasons beyond the scope of this article, has been paradoxically portrayed as both central and marginal in constructions of a national history and geography. The difficulty of placing Birmingham in relation to the contentious issue of a North-South divide is intrinsic to this indeterminacy. Generally, southerners consider it to be in the North, and northerners in the South. When you ask West Midlanders which half of the country we feel more affinity with, we tend to side with the North. However, we are generally uncomfortable with the division. This is perhaps because we sense that The North does not name a self-determined geographical entity or identity, but the internalisation of an othering originating in the powerful Southeast, which imagines it in terms analogous (but not equivalent) to Said’s Orientalism: either as subordinate or else as a virginal fantasy zone of escapist possibility. People from the West Midlands feel a sense of affinity with the neighbouring urban industrial areas of Greater Manchester, Merseyside and South Yorkshire, which might actually be best understood as constituting an industrial central belt, rather than the North per se. Put another way, the adoption of the othered identity of northernness allows people from Manchester and Sheffield to avoid the tricky problem of their own liminality. This kind of fixity is not available to Brummies.

6The consensus among geographers—insofar as the North-South divide is considered politically relevant—is that Birmingham falls into the northern half. It is the North’s major frontier city, on a diagonal line that runs from the Wash to the Severn estuary. This is where Danny Dorling places Birmingham, on the basis of a strong correlation in the economic data (Dorling 2010). But this leads him to reject the concept of the Midlands altogether, providing a neat synopsis of one of this article’s key points. ‘Ideas of a midlands region add more confusion than light’, he says (Dorling 2013).

Let the boundary
be drawn again with tact. There must be room
for the lately abandoned counties of England
and the defectors drifting north.
So have the southernmost frontier post
set at the bridge by Derby
where the ’45 petered out. My house sits
forty miles to the north, so I can show
ways through Derby by back roads in darkness.
(Fisher 1994, 36)

8However, perhaps the most apt description of the location of the West Midlands, with relation to the question of the North-South divide, allows itself to be influenced by a very Brummie kind of irony-mongery, rendering the entire concept meta-ironic. It is from the 1998 BBC documentary, Heart Bypass, written by Jonathan Meades. The scene opens with a shot of a wrecked yellow Leyland van in a Birmingham scrapyard. On the side panel, a rough outline of Great Britain has been marked out in black tape. With a can of spray paint, Meades adds a horizontal line half-way up the map, dividing the island into North and South. Then, speaking to camera, he says:

This line is called the irony curtain. It represents a sort of cultural divide. North of it people mean what they say, say what they mean. They tend towards a boastful sort of local supremacism. The idea of a vernacular quotidian irony—of speaking against yourself, of saying the opposite of what you mean—is quite unknown north of the irony curtain. [He sprays a big blob just below the line.] Birmingham is south of the irony curtain. [Cut to Meades driving.] The characteristic humour is that of self-deprecation.
(Heart Bypass, dir. Turnbull, 00:03:43–00:04:16)

9Meades is clearly reflecting how daft the notion of a North-South divide can look when seen from Birmingham. He is not really claiming Birmingham for his own sophisticated South, whose scorn towards the othered North he ironically exemplifies. However, his conclusion that Brummie humour is characteristically self-deprecating hits the wood-screw on the head. Fisher demonstrates this every time he evokes the centrality of the place in which he grew up. During his own turn ‘Talking to Cameras’, he does so with a burlesque of the kind of ‘boastful local supremacism’ Meades attributes to the North: ‘There’s one thing certain:’ he says, ‘this is / the centre of the universe. // The universe, we define / as that which is capable of having / a place like this for its centre’ (Fisher 1994, 13). Elsewhere the tone is even more flippant: a casual dismissal, combining the oral and the telegrammatic: ‘Centre. They brought a centre and set it up here, but it wouldn’t take. It was rejected, and went off sideways. No sign of it now’ (Fisher 1986a, 42). And perhaps the most damning détournement of the concept of centrality is to be found in Fisher’s sardonic portrayal, in Pickard’s film, of the neo-classical planning ethos of the city fathers, whom he had previously described as itinerant colonialists—‘The wandering officials . . . / Some generations out from home, / Playing at order’ (‘Where We Are’ 1961. Fisher 2022, 147):

Suspect repeated shifts of centre. The pace gets quicker. The Forum of Augustus, sitting firm and new, drawing centrality to itself, had to have its back to a massive curtain wall, set there to mask slum tenements behind.

Whenever the class of people who are in charge of either the ethos of the city or . . . its actual funding, whenever they say “we’re going to change Birmingham”, they nearly always go for the middle, assuming, on the Roman analogy, that . . . if you build a new forum or a new this or that, for some reason—very ordinary sort of thinking—that will radiate outwards to the colonies . . . (BIWITW 00:17:46–00:19:26)

A resident of Rutherford, New Jersey,
happens to have for sale, at collectors’
price, a wheelbarrow,
. . . Whoever buys it
gets to see the room where the original
things with ideas in them are.
(Fisher 1994, 24)

11A brief biography of the man may help to contextualise this kind of droll evasiveness for the reader unacquainted with his work.

12Fisher, who died in 2017, was a jazz pianist, a jobbing session musician, a teacher of American Studies at Keele University, and a self-effacing poet. He was born at 74 Kentish Road Handsworth. The poetic persona can be seen schlepping his old front door through the Birmingham cityscape in BIWITW, obscuring any other aspect of his identity. He lived for the first fifty or so years of his life in his native Birmingham, then retired from teaching in the eighties, to eke out a living as a session musician, moving slightly north to Staffordshire, then slightly north again to Derbyshire. The direction of this drift is less important than the fact of his displacement. It laid the ground for his most accomplished work, A Furnace, in which the mental topographies of the rural Midlands and urban Birmingham coalesce.

14Fisher certainly was influenced by some of the more eccentric poets normally called Romantics: William Blake, John Clare, John Cowper Powys. But O’Neill’s assertion that Fisher’s is ‘as sovereign an ego as any to be found in contemporary poetry’ (O’Neill 186), has a strong whiff of overstatement. Fisher has done him up like a kipper.

16In terms of Fisher’s importance in the scheme of contemporary British psychogeography, it is arguable that he is the key early figure in the innovation of urban topopoetics in the British Poetry Revival. As such, he is a significant precursor to the more London-centred psychogeography of poets like Iain Sinclair and Alan Fisher (no relation).

17His most representative works in this vein span what are sometimes considered the three phases of his writing. They begin with the collection City, first published by Migrant Press in 1961, but substantially revised in the 1968 Fulcrum Press version, including sequences from an abortive Bildungsroman, The Citizen (Fisher 2022).

18Then, in Fisher’s middle period, the key examples are the ‘Handsworth Liberties’ sequence in Carcanet’s The Thing About Joe Sullivan—which retrospectively remaps the Handsworth of Fisher’s youth under the influence of a selection of pieces of music—and, most importantly, A Furnace—in which multiple topographies, of the rural North Midlands and urban Birmingham are intertwined and polyphonically offset.

19Finally, in 1991, Tom Pickard’s film, BIWITW, and the follow up Oxford Poets collection, Birmingham River (Fisher 1994), consolidated the wry, historically synthetic response to Birmingham: a kind of ironised, psychogeographic naval gazing (sometimes deliberately wide of the mark) that most closely resembles the displaced Omphalos-tone of our title.

20The thesis of this article hinges on the ability to trace Fisher’s topopoetics to a childhood awakening. It is instructive to consider what might have made something so unlikely come about. What could prompt a working-class boy, growing up in Birmingham during the second world war, to write such concentrated poetry about such a disregarded place? The best-known of Fisher’s own accounts is highly cartographic. In Pickard’s film he says it happened when, at the age of twelve, he was given a book produced by the Cadbury Foundation, called Our Birmingham. He describes this book as: ‘a sort of civic pride look toward the future’, and adds, ‘until that moment I had never realised that you could in fact tell a story about the place that I lived in, that it was describable.’ This he attributes, in particular, to the inclusion of street maps: ‘I found them very exciting intellectually, the feeling that you could get up above the thing and know the story of it.’ He calls this a sense of ‘intellectual power . . . because a lot of that book was to do with a very utopian vision of what could be done when the old town fell down at last . . . so that people could run a set of fresh ideas across it’ (BIWITW 00:15:12 00:16:48).

22The importance of that kind of portentous use of the deictic demonstrative, this—after which the viewer is left to emote over scenes of slum life in wartime Birmingham—will become clearer as we proceed. Of immediate salience, however, is the fact that the voiceover for that film was written and performed by a poet, Dylan Thomas. As part of his wartime propaganda efforts, Thomas worked as the reluctant in-house scriptwriter for the production company, Strand Films (Lycett 224). This coincidence is perhaps Fisher’s initial inspiration for writing poetry about Birmingham. In the back of his mind, when embarking on City, we might imagine him counterpointing the overwrought voice he had heard intoning over the unprecedented visualisations of his city, at the age of twelve.

23In the Pickard film, Thomas’s soaring rhetoric is used ironically as incidental accompaniment to a shot of the Fisher persona carrying his old front door across a south elevation of Spaghetti Junction, then exiting a subway at the moment of ecstatic emancipation, heading up concrete steps towards a high-rise housing estate. This is what the viewer hears as we watch that surreal stroll, set against the backdrop of postwar Brutalism:

Going our way mister? Up the streets like dingy corridors, through the straggled, drab districts that crawl from the great centre, . . . out of the dank, grey thoroughfare. . . into the wider spaces, where trees are still green and the only smoke comes from houses: the unspoiled air that should belong to everybody, where a man may be proud of his own place and his own city. (BIWITW 00:41:50–00:42:26)

24So the seed of Fisher’s poetic career may have been planted with a desire to counterpoint Dylan Thomas’s voiceover to Birmingham’s projected postwar redevelopment. Counterpoint is, as always, a fundamental notion in my reading of Fisher’s work. The contrapuntality of most interest to us here is a multifocal treatment of deixis.

26The ethical eccentricity I contend to be characteristic of West Midlanders is so acute in Fisher’s work that he often de-centres the concept of deixis itself, not only thematically, but also functionally. However, he does not simply hollow out the deictic centre, as those critics who propound a ruined romantic subject might imply. Instead, Fisher renders deixis multifocal. This effect is more than merely analogous to playing jazz piano. The contrapuntality and syncopations of left and right hands are mapped onto the structural simultaneity of proximal and distal deixis: there and here, that and this, then and now.

27The two great middle period works, A Furnace and ‘Handsworth Liberties’, are where this effect achieves its greatest structural importance. It is the sequence ‘Handsworth Liberties’ that makes the polyphonic effect most obvious. Fisher provided a brief explanatory note to the sequence in his Bloodaxe collection, The Long and the Short of It: ‘In this sequence, I . . . investigate a habitual synaesthesia whereby many familiar pieces of music would inevitably conjure visual recollections of particular . . . locations in the district of Birmingham I grew up in’ (Fisher 2012, 540).

28It is important to note that Fisher is not merely talking about listening to music here. He also means that the synaesthesia occurs when playing music. When he says, ‘I have held my hands to the displaced Omphalos stone’, it is worth remembering that these hands are adept at doing two different things at once, to maintaining two, sometimes pointedly displaced, melodic lines. So, it was probably quite natural for him to conceive of syncopated interactions between here and there, now and then:

From here to there –
a trip between two locations
ill-conceived, raw, surreal
outgrowths of common sense, almost
merging one into the other
except for the turn
where here and there
change places, the moment
always a surprise:
on an ordinary day a brief
lightness, charm between realities;
on a good day, a break
life can flood in and fill. (Fisher 1978, 40)

29As with contrapuntal voicings, the fact of deictic simultaneity contains the possibility of conjunction and overlap. In the following case, in section 2 of the sequence, the intersection of now and then, the new road and the old, ‘doubles the daylight’, in the sense of doubling the ‘spaces’, and thus increasing the displacement of the built environment. Initially that is just the gap between the buildings, but it becomes the gap between the unbuilt then and the newly built now, such that the spaces, drifting from the historical past into the present tense, ‘remain clear, even when built on’:

Lazily into the curve,
two roads of similar importance
but different ages, join,
doubling the daylight
where the traffic doubles,
the spaces
where the new cut through
cleared the old buildings back
remaining clear
even when built on. (Fisher 1978, 38–39)

30Section 15 of ‘Handsworth Liberties’ is the best known, for its Dantean and chiaroscuro treatment of the ruins of what Fisher calls the ‘sheer hell’ at the bottom of his road when he was growing up: an area he describes as ‘one of those good old, late Victorian, prosperous hells . . . the blast furnaces and open workshop doors with men stripped to the buff, banging away at hot metal . . . the back of the Soho foundry’ (BIWITW 00:07:47–00:08:13):

No dark in the body
deep as this
even though the sun
hardens the upper world.
A ladder
climbs down under the side
in the shadow of the tank
and crosses tarry pools.
. . .
and out there past the shade
sunlit rust hangs on the still water.
Deep as we go
into the stink
this is not the base,
not the ground. This
is the entertainment.
(Fisher 1978, 45–46)

31This is also a subterranean conceptualisation of deixis as musical counterpoint. The object of this section—echoing that portentous deictic demonstrative in Dylan Thomas’s 1943 voiceover—is a seemingly bottomless ‘this’ (this place, this vision, this music, this mood, but also the very idea of this, of proximal deixis), into which the plural first person subject, ‘we’, is lowered like the prisoner into the tin-mine in Tony Harrison’s ‘National Trust.’ As we descend deeper into the shaft, having glanced ‘out there past the shade’, where there is scant consolation—the sun only highlights the rust—then we return to the deep, dark this to read ‘this is not the base / not the ground. This / is the entertainment.’ Fisher is not merely saying, there is no bottom to this pit of this, unequivocally rejecting the deictic ground zero, but he is also providing a homophonic hint of his musical conception of the rejection of centripetal deixis itself: this is not the ground bass, this is not the basso ostinato.

32At stake here is the construction of the poetic subject—O’Neill’s ‘sovereign ego’—which is only an emergent property in poetry, whether or not it is imagined to derive from a spiritual, or existential antecedent. The primary mechanism of this process of emergence is, of course, deixis.

33There are plenty of ways to render poetic subjectivity unstable, some of which are employed in even the most egocentric Romantic works, like Wordsworth’s Prelude, and O’Neill demonstrates that the exploration of this sort of instability is a definitive characteristic of post-romantic poetry. But Fisher’s approach is more influenced by the modernist scientific concepts of relativity, indeterminacy, and psychoanalysis, as Kerrigan has shown.

Under my heel, a loop of wire
Dragged in the dust is earth’s wide eye;
Unseen for days,
Unseen days.
(‘The Hill behind the Town’, 1961. Fisher 2022, 174)

35Crucially, Fisher’s multifocal renderings of local deixis—arguably characteristic of the unseen eye/I of Birmingham—not only call into question the concept of the poetic subject as a singularity, but they also destabilise a core assumption about the grammatical function of the subject in the English language. They do so by pivoting towards a structural ergativity. In linguistics, ergative-absolutive alignment refers to a syntactic organisation, found in languages like Basque and Georgian, in which the subject of an intransitive argument has the same formal characteristics as the patient (what we usually call the object) of a transitive argument (Dixon).

36This is the opposite structure to the one we know in nominative-accusative languages, in which the subject of an intransitive argument has the same formal characteristics as the agent of a transitive argument. In fact, non-linguists, including most poetry critics, tend to conflate these two functions into the singular concept the subject. Fisher’s shifts towards ergativity undermine this conflation.

37The word ergative derives from the Greek ἐργάτης, ‘workman.’ The metaphor is suggestive. If an ergative workman implicitly works (acts upon) a material (the patient), the intransitive subject (the ego) is not identified with this worker-agent—as would usually be the case in English or French—but with the wrought object: the material or the workpiece.

39In French, we have the adage, C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron. The tautology is a brummagem screwdriver; it hammers home the precedence of practice over theory. Literally, it means: ‘It is by smithing that one becomes a smith’, but in a nominative-accusative language, the drift to the transitive is frictionless: ‘it is by working metal that one becomes a metalworker.’

40This would not be true of an ergative language. If we were to shift towards the cognitive metaphor implicit in ergativity, then the French idiom might be intralingually translated as: C’est en forgeant que l’on est forgé, ‘It is by forging that one is forged’, or more generally, ‘It is by working that one is wrought.’

41This structural defamiliarisation constantly resonates in the themes of Fisher’s work, even in his earliest compositions. In an uncollected poem from the fifties, ‘Fog at Birmingham’, he develops a problematic extended metaphor of the local industrial process of dropforging:

When the sun’s thick palm
Was thrust down hard all day
on the fired streets
Pressing the city down
among its own underground furnaces — . . .
When, outlined among my outlined million,
I could be
No more than another annealed cavity, a shard,
          cut down into the ground.
(Fisher 2022, 140–141)

42Here, the putative poetic subject is not the operator of the drop-forge, stamping a finely tooled identity on the material, but the object forged by the act of perception.

43In A Furnace the effect is taken further. The epistemological defamiliarisation involves a shift of perceptual causality, and thus of agency, from the perceiver onto the built environment. It is the environment that builds, not only thought, but a deterministic ontology:

Whatever
approaches my passive taking-in,
. . .
will have itself understood only
phase upon phase
by separate involuntary
strokes of my mind, dark
swings of a fan-blade,
. . . the stages of the street,
each bred off the last as if by
causality.
Because
of the brick theatre struck to the roadside
the shops in the next
street run in a curve, and
because of that there is raised up
with red lead on its girders
a gasworks
close beyond the roofs,
and because of the fold of the
folding in of these three to me
there comes a frame tower with gaps
in its corrugated cladding.
(Fisher 1986b, 2–3)

44A reader like Michael O’Neill might consider this solipsistic, but the ego is certainly not sovereign here. There is no overweening singular agent. Instead, the ego is stamped and restamped, like a restruck sovereign coin.

45The crux of the argument, then, is that a contrapuntal approach to deixis—a result of Fisher’s extension of the problem of the topographical centre in his sense of where he comes from—is applied to an ongoing reconstruction of the poetic and grammatical subject. He achieves this defamiliarising effect, at the local level, by composing lines and sentences in which prosodic effects alter transitivity, causing the subject position to pivot between the roles of grammatical agent and patient. This is what is meant by ergativity. Our final example demonstrates all of this working in combination:

there presses in
—and not as conscience—
what concentrates down in the warm hollow: 
. . .
bove, dignity. A new precinct
comes over the scraped hill,
flats on the ridge get the last light.
Down Wheeler Street, the lamps
already gone, the windows have
lake stretches of silver
gashed out of tea green shadows,
. . .
A conscience
builds, late, on the ridge. A realism
tries to record, before they’re gone,
what silver filth these drains have run.
(‘For Realism’, 1965. Fisher 1988, 54–55)

46A full close reading of this extract would take up too much space, but it is worth drawing attention to a few salient aspects. Firstly, the gradation of the subjective consciousness of the realist poet into the moral concept of conscience is important. This is not mere observationalism. Secondly, there is a crucial ambiguity of transitivity in the line ‘what concentrates down in the hollow.’ This potentially refers to everything that follows, rendered appositive by the colon. It could be understood, metaphorically, as a chemical product: the object of an industrial process of concentration. But it could equally be the concentrating subjectivity: that which performs a cognitive act of concentration. The cohesive pairing of this line with the similarly ambiguous last line, ‘what silver filth these drains have run’, is crucial to understanding how something that was acting ‘not as a conscience’ has become ‘a conscience.’ Thirdly, it is typical of the multifocal prosody of Fisher’s free verse that the three penultimate lines can be read with a variety of rhythms: running-on, or getting blocked, like the drains. Fourthly, the phrase ‘before they’re gone’ is highly ambivalent in terms of textual reference. So much of this environment is soon to be gone that it is hard to tell. Is they anaphoric: a reference back to the flats, or the lamps, or the windows? Is it cataphoric: a reference forwards to the drains? Or might it be a reference in both directions: backwards to the ‘lake stretches of silver’ and thus also forwards to the ‘silver filth’? Might it even be an exophoric reference to, say, the displaced inhabitants?

47The point is not to answer these questions but to recognise that different rhythmic performances fundamentally alter syntax, textual cohesion, and sense. This is what Fisher does. Contrapuntal deixis is mapped onto multifocal reference. Different musical interpretations create different hermeneutic interpretations, all of which co-exist in polyphonic interaction. This is the nature of counterpoint, and Fisher seems to encourage improvised contrapuntal interpretations.

48At stake, in this case, is the fundamental question of what is meant by ‘a conscience builds, late, on the ridge.’ Does an abstract conscience build intransitively—like a sensation, or a crescendo? Or does a concrete conscience build transitively, either as an individual human mind—constructing a poetry of conscience—or, more prosaically, a collective conscience, a (fallible) civic will that builds something in the concrete environment to improve the lives of its inhabitants? After all, this poem was composed just after they had finished the new high-rise flats on the ridge beyond the top of Wheeler Street, toward which Fisher’s front door was carried, 30 years on, in Pickard’s film, as Dylan Thomas intoned his rousing wartime climax about civic pride.

49This is where Fisher’s poetry is coming from: the centre of the universe and the middle of nowhere. And he is constantly returning, in what is often an ironic vortex of free verse that dislodges the pivot of a centripetal psychogeography… always going home, despite the fact, or perhaps because:

you can be sure, if it’s Birmingham,
that everything’ll be altered
by the time you’d have wanted it again.
This isn’t Yorkshire, or Paris. (Fisher 1994, 11)