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.

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. It does not cover his later collection, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books, 2010).

'There is no poet alive whose work has challenged or interested me more’ – August Kleinzahler

'The personality that emerges from Fisher's poetry, for all his influences, is altogether English: ironic, humorous, self-deprecating and unpretentiously local' – Elaine Feinstein

'A poet of cities in growth and in dereliction…His knowledge of urban landscape is formidable, and expressed with an originality of touch which makes these poems, at their best, revelatory’ – Helen Dunmore

'Fisher’s fineness lies in the extraordinary, intimate communication he achieves. He accomplishes this through the medium of a sophisticated, well-mannered art…a real respect for his own and his reader’s individuality’ – Anne Cluysenaar