An Easily Bewildered Child

When in his seventieth year Roy Fisher published Interviews Through Time (2000), he added a Selected Prose, which meant in effect three pieces: 'Antebiography', 'Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher' and 'Talks for Words'. The enlarged second edition of Interviews Through Time (2013), a volume of interviews only, made it possible for those three pieces to join many others in this first substantial gathering of Roy Fisher's occasional prose writings. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013 brings together all his rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, 'owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends'. Together they provide a unique guide to the complex sources and influences on such distinctive works such as City, The Ship's Orchestra, and A Furnace as well as Fisher's oeuvre of individual poems. As Peter Robinson notes in his editor's Introduction, these writings in their various ways provide 'essential aids to those ramblers' who 'choose to stray' among the poetry and imaginative prose of a key contemporary English poet.