Jane Routh reviews Missing the Man Next Door by Annie Fisher (Mariscat, 2024)
Annie Fisher’s pamphlet is a warm-hearted one. That’s the word that keeps coming to mind whether I’m reading about the titular man next door, a chance encounter with a woman in a park during lockdown, a beech tree, her dead mother’s body, Catholic schooling and worship … The closest she comes to a negative thought is anticipating who might replace the man next door, for no matter who “The new neighbour” might be:
even if he’s owlish with a taste for poetry
and has the house re-fitted like an Oxford library
even if he trusts me with a key
to feed his fish when he’s away
he will not take the place of John
who died in the pandemic at the age of ninety four —
We don’t actually meet the late man next door until almost half-way through the pamphlet. He turns out to have been a noisy chap with “Classic FM turned up to deafening” and a “Brian Blessed voice” – not someone we’d all be glad to live alongside, but Annie Fisher is interested in people, and her writing seems to spring from real empathy with others as well as an ability to listen.
In ‘Someone in the park today (she didn’t say her name)’, for example, it feels as if I’m actually hearing the voice and speech rhythms of a woman met by chance during lockdown, who recounts her life story:
[…] I did it for a dare.
It was a Monday night in August. All of this was fields back then.
Tuesday he took me to the Odeon. Wednesday afternoon
his place for tea. It’s what we did then —meet the family.
Fish paste sandwiches and pink blancmange.
With no stanza breaks, and a woman eager to talk, we’re soon onto “Next thing you know we’re / getting married. We had a girl in ’61. Our Margaret.” The big events of life merely labelled, it’s the specifics of small details (like those sandwiches) which give the account its authenticity, before later troubles are recounted and the poem ends with “Sorry love, / I do go on. I’m sure you’ve had enough of me.”
Annie Fisher is interested in people, and her writing seems to spring from real empathy with others as well as an ability to listen
“The house grew hushed and servile / when they called”, Annie Fisher writes in ‘Priests’, but goes on to assess these clergymen in a rather more understanding light than others have done:
Some were demons. Some were saints.
One (dear Father Clement) was an angel.
They starved for lack of ordinary love.
Nevertheless, she has fun with ‘The improbable perfections of the parson’s pets’, a poem which begins “The Parson’s cat’s a contemplative cat. / The Parson’s dog is divine”, before charging through a small menagerie to “the Parson himself is a wicked old sod, / Who’s probably going to hell.” I see from the jacket that Annie Fisher also writes poems for children, and this jaunty short piece could well be one such. Some small friends of mine would love it.
With a background in primary education and now semi-retired, the pamphlet’s bio seems to imply that the author may have started writing later in life, though ‘Mountain Lion’ tells us of the sudden impact of poetry at school in “the summer Petula Clark sang / Don’t sleep in the subway, darlin” (1967). D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Mountain Lion’ was the eye opener:
[…] I didn’t know till then
you could write poems normally, like talking,
and you could start sentences with And.
And if you wanted you could use no rhyme at all.
In a chatty prose poem, ‘A muse called Maureen’, she charts coming to grips with writing poetry helped by Maureen, who “got bored with rhyme and rhythm” and “had me faff about with oddly delineated stuff that neither of us could understand. She said it was what proper poets wrote.” Maureen’s humour “wasn’t subtle, especially after wine” – indeed, she polishes off a bottle in the fridge (which was probably being saved) before vanishing, leaving Annie Fisher writing prose “which (strange to say)” she finds liberating.
Nevertheless, she does essay a variety of poetic forms, and sometimes with Maureen’s sense of humour behind them. ‘A few favourite things’, for example, is a list poem, and is just that, a list: “oboes, pine cones, pangolins / several of the deadly sins, / piccalilli, pie and mash”. Marmite is in there, as is Seamus Heaney, though its final two items are “soul and song”. The pamphlet itself – well-presented, as are all Mariscat publications – concludes like a song, too, with ‘The old dancing woman of Bridgwater Town’ who dances merrily all through the town to her own rhythms and the town’s place-names:
Now she’s waltzing down Windown and Parkway and Broadway
and skipping up Durleigh and down Orchard Lane
and she’s off to the Quantocks, to Triscombe and Crowcombe,
and no-one can stop her, not ever again.
Jane Routh has published four poetry collections and a prose book, Falling into Place (about rural north Lancashire) with Smith|Doorstop. Circumnavigation (2002) was shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best First Collection, Teach Yourself Mapmaking (2006) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and she has won the Cardiff International and the Strokestown International Poetry Competitions.Her latest book is Listening to the Night (Smith|Doorstop, 2018) and a pamphlet, After, was published by Wayleave Press in 2021.
