The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems - Tapa blanda

The Dow Low Drop celebrates forty years of Roy Fisher's wonderfully witty and anarchic poetry. In delicate, playful excursions through a world of sense and perception, he captures the flavour of hide-and-seek reality or diffident experience. Roy Fisher's poetry is most often associated with the post-industrial landscape of the Midlands, but it is universal in its appeal. He is a keenly experimental writer who draws from situations, perceptions and emotions which go beyond time or place. His poetry's ultimate domain is the imagination. Roy Fisher is a jazz pianist as well as a writer, and there is an improvisatory freedom in the natural correspondences he uses to track life's oddities and surprises. But he is also a great pleasure-seeker. The reputation he gained in the 60s and 70s as a difficult poet is wrong: this book shows that he is one of the funniest, most open and liberating writers of his generation - another good reason to celebrate this exciting introduction to Fisher's brilliant and beautiful work. This selection draws on the full range of Roy Fisher's poetry, including classics such as The Thing About Joe Sullivan, City, A Furnace and The Dow Low Drop itself, a new sequence published here for the first time. This selection is now out of print, having been superseded by The Long and the Short of It.

Roy Fisher (1930-2017) published over 30 poetry books, and was the subject of numerous critical essays and several studies, including The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson and John Kerrigan (Liverpool University Press, 2000), and of The Unofficial Roy Fisher, edited by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books, 2010). He published four books with Bloodaxe. The Dow Low Drop: New & Selected Poems (1996) was superseded by his later retrospective, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 (2005), and followed by Standard Midland (2010), published on his 80th birthday, which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. An expanded edition, The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010 - including Standard Midland - was published in 2012. His first US Selected Poems, edited by August Kleinzahler, was published by Flood Editions in 2011. His final collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems (2016) is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Born in Handsworth, Birmingham, he retired as Senior Lecturer in American Studies from Keele University in 1982. He was also a jazz musician, and lived in the Derbyshire Peak District in his later years.