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last update:
 
24 May15

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Janet Fisher at The Poetry Business  

poetry favourites:
Shoestring Press
 
The Poetry Business  

and in the shop…
collection –
“Life and Other Terms”
Shoestring Press;
 
“Brittle Bones”
Salt;
 
“Women Who Dye Their Hair”
and
“Listening to Dancing”
Smith/Doorstop
 

 


 
Janet Fisher (1943 - 2016)

 

As provided by Janet in May 2015:
 
Janet Fisher was born in Birmingham and grew up in North Oxfordshire. Having graduated in Law she spent some years in legal publishing and F E teaching. Sadly, children and long term illness stymied any chance of a proper career, but on her family’s move to Huddersfield she joined Peter Sansom’s workshops and began to write poetry. She was for twenty years co-director and co-editor of the Poetry Business. In 2014 she gained a distinction in an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University.
 
Life and Other Terms is Janet’s fourth full collection. She is a skilled and thoughtful poet. She writes in many styles, some strictly formal, others innovative and challenging. Her poems relate to real life, not necessarily her own, though many are autobiographical, about her Midlands childhood, her London life and her family. At this later stage in her life, her work is often tinged with sadness but never sentimental or mawkish, and there is an underlying current of humour and realism throughout.
 
Review comments:
 

Fisher has a talent for the acute angle, the oblique perspective, sudden shifts of light. She writes of how in ageing and illness, the familiar is made strange, using imagery that roots the imagined in the actual.

 

Lavinia Greenlaw, Mslexia

 

It’s a strong woman’s voice, hardened by time and tough choices … reality tempered by a knowing ear, that instinctively finds the music inherent in all good poetry.

 

Jane Holland, Blade