The Long and the Short of It

The Long and the Short of It celebrates the 50-year-long writing career of Roy Fisher and the all-too-short 75 years (thus far) he has lived on this planet. 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. Roy Fisher's most notable achievements have included his exploration of the modern city, his experiments with perception and sensory experience, his jazz-inspired prose and his political and cultural comedies. His voice too has made its argumentative presence strongly felt: uplifting but also down-to-earth, sometimes cantankerous but also companionable, sarcastic yet sociable, playfully extravagant while wise and grounded. The Long and the Short of It covers 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 beyond.

Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 7 November, 11.15am, repeated Friday 12 November, 9am
 
Ian McMillan is the guest on Sunday’s edition of Desert Island Discs.  He has chosen Roy Fisher’s retrospective The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 as his book to take to a fictional desert island. 
 
The Long and the Short of It was published in 2005 and is still available.  Roy Fisher’s subsequent collection Standard Midland was published in June of this year to mark his 80th birthday.
 
You can listen to the programme live or via the Desert Island Discs page of the BBC website, where it will be available for several weeks after first broadcast.

 
The 17 October edition of Desert Island Discs featuring Benjamin Zephaniah reading one of his poems is still available on the BBC website.