Roy Fisher

When Roy Fisher told Gael Turnbull in 1960 that he had ‘started writing like mad’ and produced ‘a sententious prose book, about the length of a short novel, called the Citizen’ he was registering a sea change in his work, finding a mode to express his almost visceral connection with Birmingham in a way that drew on his sensibility and a wealth of materials that could last a lifetime. Much later in his career he would say that ‘Birmingham is what I think with.’ This ‘mélange of evocation, maundering, imagining, fiction and autobiography,’ as he called it, was written ‘so as to be able to have a look at myself & see what I think.’ All that was known of this work before Fisher’s death in 2017 is that fragments from it had been used as the prose sections in City and that – never otherwise published – it was thought not to have survived. This proved not to be the case, and in The Citizen and the Making of City, Peter Robinson, the poet’s literary executor, has edited the breakthrough fragment and placed it in conjunction with the first 1961 published version of Fisher’s signature collage of poetry and prose, along with a never published longer manuscript of it found among the poet’s archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction. By offering in a single publication the definitive 1969 text, two variant versions of City, its prose origins in The Citizen and continuation in Then Hallucinations, as well as some of the poetry left behind, this landmark publication offers a unique insight into Roy Fisher's most emblematic work. It is supplemented with an anthology of Fisher’s own comments on City and a secondary bibliography of criticism on his profound response to changes wrought upon England’s industrial cities in the middle of the 20th century.

Addressing the Professional Standards for Teachers and Trainers, this bestselling textbook helpfully balances theory and practice, introducing key theories and concepts relating to learning and assessment as well as providing practical advice on teaching. Extensively revised and updated to reflect the current educational policy environment, this textbook for teaching provides thorough and extensive coverage of the topics for higher-level awards in Education and Training. The textbook provides a logical progression through the essential aspects of teaching, such as planning and assessment; it considers key related areas including teacher professionalism, equality and diversity, and mentoring and coaching; and it presents this invaluable guidance in an accessible and readable format. In outlining the challenges, opportunities, and debates in and around lifelong learning, the editors and contributing authors draw on their extensive teaching experience, as well as offering an evidence-based approach with a wide range of research. Teaching in Lifelong Learning: A Guide to Theory and Practice is core reading for those teaching or preparing to teach in further, higher and community education as well as in public sector contexts and in private training organisations, including those studying for CertEd/PGCE and related awards, such as the Level 4 Certificate and Level 5 Diploma in Education and Training.'Teacher education in FE continues to be an important and unresolved issue, and this book is a great asset in supporting individuals in understanding and developing their practices. With a focus on developing critical, inquiring practitioners, the text reads like an experienced mentor sharing pointers, questions, and useful readings over a collegial cup of coffee'. Dr Tim Herrick, Senior University Teacher, University of Sheffield, UK

Slakki is Old Norse for a shallow depression among hills: 'Not much of a valley. A Slack,' writes Roy Fisher, with typical self effacement. But appearances are deceptive where this Slakki is concerned. Opening with new poems written during his 80s - since his Costa-shortlisted collection Standard Midland (2010) - the book's second section is a gathering of uncollected poems mainly written during the 1960s, though occasionally foreshadowed later in the previous decade, while the third part contains poems, similarly uncollected, written in the 1950s. 'I describe the poems in sections two and three of this book as neglected,' Roy Fisher writes in an afterword. 'I must emphasise that these poems have not been passed over or slighted by publishers, editors or reviewers: indeed my work always seems to me to have had as much attention as it deserved or was likely to get. The neglect has been entirely mine.' Fisher's Collected Poems 1968 from Fulcrum was a carefully constructed volume whose cut down selection was carried over into later retrospectives: 'The cut material was left to lie more or less unexamined again until now. That turn of events furnishes the majority of the neglected items in the present volume. There's an element of what could better be called habitual negligence that also has a bearing.' Peter Robinson produced and ordered the texts of Slakki in response to instructions and advice from Roy Fisher. Derek Slade contributed substantially to composing the notes on sources and earlier appearances of the works gathered here.

When in his seventieth year Roy Fisher published Interviews Through Time (2000), he added and Selected Prose, which meant in effect three pieces: 'Antebiography', 'Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher' and 'Talks for Words'. The enlarged second edition of Interviews Through Time (2013), a volume of interviews only, made it possible for those three pieces to join many others in this first substantial gathering of Roy Fisher's occasional prose writings. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013 brings together all his rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, 'owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends'. Together they provide a unique guide to the complex sources and influences on such distinctive works such as City, The Ship's Orchestra, and A Furnace as well as Fisher's oeuvre of individual poems. As Peter Robinson notes in his editor's Introduction, these writings in their various ways provide 'essential aids to those ramblers' who 'choose to stray' among the poetry and imaginative prose of a key contemporary English poet.

This volume contains excerpts from several interviews conducted throughout the author's career and spliced together to form a coherent narrative of his development and his aesthetic. The book closes with two full-length interviews, conducted by Peter Robinson and John Kerrigan. Essential to an understanding of Roy Fisher's work as a poet.

This new expanded edition of "The Long and the Short of It" covers 55 years of Roy Fisher's poetry. Playing the language, pleasuring the imagination and teasing the senses, Fisher's witty, inventive and anarchic poetry has given lasting delight to his many dedicated readers for over half a century. Choosing this book on "Desert Island Discs", Ian McMillan praised Fisher as "Britain's greatest living poet". "The Long and the Short of It" draws on the entire range of Fisher's work, from its fraught beginnings in the 1950s through major texts of the 1960s and 1970s as "City", "The Ship's Orchestra" and 'Wonders of Obligation' to "A Furnace", his 1980s masterpiece, and and then the later work set in the scarred and beautiful North Midlands landscape where he has lived for the past 30 years, notably the Costa-shortlisted "Standard Midland" (2010), which has been added to this expanded edition.

Education in Popular Culture explores what makes schools, colleges, teachers and students an enduring focus for a wide range of contemporary media. What is it about the school experience that makes us wish to relive it again and again? The book provides an overview of education as it is represented in popular culture, together with a framework through which educators can interpret these representations in relation to their own professional values and development. The analyses are contextualised within contemporary, historical and ideological frameworks, and make connections between popular representations and professional and political discourses about education. Through its examination of film, television, popular lyrics and fiction, this book tackles educational themes that recur in popular culture, and demonstrates how they intersect with debates concerning teacher performance, the curriculum and young people’s behaviour and morality. Chapters explore how experiences of education are both reflected and constructed in ways that sometimes reinforce official and professional educational perspectives, and sometimes resist and oppose them. Education in Popular Culture will stimulate critical reflection on the popular myths and professional discourses that surround teachers and teaching. It will serve to deepen analyses of teaching and learning and their associated institutional and societal contexts in a creative and challenging way.

Education in Popular Culture explores what makes schools, colleges, teachers and students an enduring focus for a wide range of contemporary media. What is it about the school experience that makes us wish to relive it again and again? The book provides an overview of education as it is represented in popular culture, together with a framework through which educators can interpret these representations in relation to their own professional values and development. The analyses are contextualised within contemporary, historical and ideological frameworks, and make connections between popular representations and professional and political discourses about education. Through its examination of film, television, popular lyrics and fiction, this book tackles educational themes that recur in popular culture, and demonstrates how they intersect with debates concerning teacher performance, the curriculum and young people’s behaviour and morality. Chapters explore how experiences of education are both reflected and constructed in ways that sometimes reinforce official and professional educational perspectives, and sometimes resist and oppose them. Education in Popular Culture will stimulate critical reflection on the popular myths and professional discourses that surround teachers and teaching. It will serve to deepen analyses of teaching and learning and their associated institutional and societal contexts in a creative and challenging way.