Oystercatcher
Press
Allen Fisher:
£4.00 A5 16pp. ISBN: 978-1-905885-16-9.
| The
writer has not been homeless for more than ten years, but in a
situation of
living an ‘in transit’ existence between a
potential home and a room in a
college orchard, in and surrounded by a culture that has almost died
from its own
self-congratulation, its own internet support for a mixture of the
mediocre and
nonsense, its own contribution to rubbish. Proposals,
a sequence of 35 emblems each comprised of a poem, an
image and a
commentary, started in this climate and burn-out.
BIRDS brings
together 10 poems from Proposals. The subjects move from
burning and wasted
energy to the desolation of an environment in Crewe, the 150-year-old
railway
town, and the routes from there to London, Manchester, Stafford,
Birmingham,
Glasgow and Cardiff. In
particular the
routes through rubbish tips, wasted landscapes and wealthy estates. BIRDS, extracted from Proposals,
lifts from this melancholy of
existence and its partner mourning, for an unrecoverable and false
celebration
towards a set of modest and local observations. 17 Orchard ablaze with daffodils a mistle thrush signals a sky sprayed with hundreds of starlings moving in a changing cloud formation until a swan opens his wings in my head and I take a deep breath my chest fills with the sound of a flyer as it pulls out to London smacked dead on the rails a tawny white-spotted owl
|