The Citizen - Roy Fisher

This innovative edition brings together previously lost material to chart the genesis of a key work in 20th-century Modernist poetry

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published longer manuscript of it found among the poet's archive at the University of Sheffield, and some previously unpublished poems that were considered for inclusion during the complex evolution of the work that Robinson tracks in his introduction.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.