Author Description

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.