Brummagem Xanthos

In memory of Roy Fisher 

On my first trip back to Brum after hearing that Roy Fisher had died, I walked up to the confluence of the Rea and the Tame. This is not a stroll I would recommend to a visitor. Nor is it the kind of place I would have chosen to associate with the memory of a poet I admired so deeply. But ‘Birmingham River’ forces me to, and that peculiarly Brummie conjugation of bleakness and optimism, the grim and the playful, which Roy Fisher so adroitly captured, is as thickly layered here as anywhere. I took two decisions. The first was to take up learning the piano: a hamfisted tribute. The second was finally to go through with an idea I’d been toying with for years: a Brummie version of the Iliad, written in what De Quincey called ‘Birmingham Hexameters’. The most directly relevant part of that epic to this particular spot is Book 21, in which the river god Xanthos takes umbrage with Achilles, who has been clogging his channels with dead Trojans, and calls on his tributary, Simoeis, to team up and kill the berzerk Greek hero. Understandably, this book has come to be reread, in recent years, for its environmental undertow. So, I’ve dedicated my version of Book 21 of the Iliad to Roy Fisher. This little oxbow of a poem is a recollection of that day, incorporating a brief extract of one of Xanthos’s speeches from my translation … which has dragged the whole thing into hexameters. Perhaps it seems an inappropriate tribute from a minor tributary. What can I say? Birmingham’s what I think with. It wasn’t made for that sort of job, but it’s what they gave me … 

Under spaghetti junction, veering away from its long legs, 

Xanthos dribbles on. He tickles a curling rebar – 

Fourteen mil or so – lapping around the corns of the M6. 

Floating asterisks loiter about by a ream of deck slabs. 

Daisies maybe? Reels from a shelled cassette tape? Footnotes. 

Even today, it smacks of Achilles: a rattling wingnut, 

Heaps of scrap like pillaged armour, a blade of sunlight – 

‘Come on, our kid, get a jerk on,’ he mutters, ‘let’s do the flash git: 

Swanning about like he owns the place, like he’s some kinda gods’ gift. 

Pump all the juice from your culverts; really give it the full bore. 

Crank up your weirs. Burst your banks. Scoop up the boulders; 

Rip out the trees and the hawthorns; pummel them down on the ruffneck. 

Frankly, I don’t give a toss if he’s hard... much less a dream-boat. 

Dollars to donuts, all of that top grade weaponry ends up 

Sunk in the mud in some gulley or other, covered in pondweed. 

Trust me, I’ll lay down a blanket of sludge and shingle so deep 

None of his mates will ever dredge his remains from my thick silt.’ 

Sam Trainor is a poet and translator from Birmingham. He grew up just over a mile from Roy Fisher’s childhood address of 74 Kentish Road Handsworth. He now lives in Northern France and works as a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at l’Université de Lille. Most of his publications are academic in nature and concern his theory of Contrapuntal Translation, but he does keep his poetic hand in when he can. Besides the long-term project of the Brummiad (mentioned in the note to his contribution), he has recently published a version of Ronsard’s ‘La défloration de Lède’ (PN Review 48.2) and is completing a multivocal translation of Jean-Paul Auxeméry’s ‘Jazz’ sequence. He is also translating a selection of Roy Fisher’s poetry into French, with the ultimate goal of producing an introductory volume. A forthcoming article in the journal Études britanniques contemporaines (67 | 2025) examines the ‘ergativity’ of Fisher’s poetry, in relation to his vision of the poetic subject, not as the primary mover of perception occupying the deictic centre, but as an object wrought by the work of poetry. 

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