Rowley Rag: The poetry of Liz Berry and Roy Fisher in a Black Country 'genius loci'

Rowley Rag explores the genius loci of a triangle of land in the heart of the English Black Country, running two miles or so from Dudley Castle to the quarries of the Rowley Hills, with a triangulation point at St. Andrew’s Church, Netherton, a mile to the south. This terrain is that of Roy Fisher’s poems ‘Quarry Hills’, ‘In the Black Country’ and ‘The Burning Graves at Netherton’, overlapping with that of Liz Berry in Black Country, a landscape of industrial dereliction and geological importance, cut through with old tunnels and human complexity. I place this in the context three phases in Black Country writing, from representations of ‘panoramas of hell’ (Williams), ‘absence’ (M Fisher) and ‘gatherer of voices’ (Berry). I consider the voices in Berry’s poems, the images in Fisher’s, and historical figures, such as George Smith, ‘the Dudley Hangman’, in relation to the performative violence, human and animal (public hangings, bareknuckle boxing, bear and badger baiting), environmental (quarrying, mining, ironworking) and structural (economic, housing) that exemplify the place and inform its poetics.