The Fisher Obligation

The society of singing birds and insects

glides its song on the crowded air,

as if the city remains as image of itself

from blueprint to demolition in one beat,

birds, insects flying beyond civic wisdom.

Listen hard to the name they speak,

a dancing trio of notes – Roy Fisher, Roy Fisher;

from a green plot and thinking shade

where that hare, zig-zagging slowly

imprints its paw on poetry’s field-path.

In the orchestra of the SS Surreal

Roy said, music makes space,

never pumping it left hand

but letting the lyric grace enter

the syntax of streets and canals.

He saw the poor of Birmingham,

built over, buried under, unforgotten,

in war the pit made ready for the living;

who stay and leave in the same moment,

navigating the Dark River open-eyed.

For generations compressed lives thinking

the air of brick-dust, the tight web of names,

with a Brummagem screwdriver to hand – useful.

You don’t need a map for the already known,

who dreams an atlas of the wrap-around world?

With no show, no pomp, Roy made his answer

in Newcastle-under-Lyme twenty years ago

standing with Carl Rakosi and Gael Turnbull:

come up, come up my thinking shades, see that hare

zig-zagging slowly like the shadow of a hare.

Kelvin Corcoran grew up in the English Midlands the son of an alcoholic Irish father and a loving mother. As a child he benefited from free school milk and the family allowance. By virtue of a good teacher, he went to university and read poetry.  His first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, was published in 1985, followed by numerous books through to his most recent Below This Level, 2019, The Republic of Song, 2020, and Collected Poems, 2023. With Robert Sheppard he is co-editor of the New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood, 2023. Corcoran was a teacher for 33 years and then for a while a voluntary worker in the NHS.  His work has been commended by the Poetry Society, the Forward Prize committee and commissioned by the Arts Council and Medicine Unboxed.  He lives in Brussels.

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