The “late modernist” poet Roy Fisher has died aged 86, after a short illness. He was born in Handsworth, Birmingham, and after studying English at Birmingham University, taught in schools and colleges, and went on to lecture in American Studies at Keele University from 1971 until his retirement in 1982. Reviewing Fisher’s poetry in the Guardian, Sean O’Brien wrote: “Fisher stands outside, or alongside, whatever else is happening, an English late modernist whose experiments tend to come off. He is a poet of the city – his native Birmingham, which he describes as ‘what I think with’.”

The publisher Bloodaxe said they were “enormously saddened” by the news. Fisher published over 30 poetry books, including four with Bloodaxe since 1996. The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010 was chosen by Ian McMillan as his book on Desert Island Discs, as he praised Fisher as “Britain’s greatest living poet”'. Fisher’s final collection, Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, edited by Peter Robinson, was launched at an event in October 2016 in Birmingham Cathedral, which he was unable to attend, due to frail health.

He became interested in jazz as a teenager, playing with local bands, and was especially influenced by Chicago musicians such as Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell, and the pianist Joe Sullivan, whom he celebrated in one of his best-known poems, ‘The Thing About Joe Sullivan’. For much of his life he combined music and poetry with teaching. His music features in Tom Pickard’s film profile, Birmingham’s What I Think With. He had been housebound for several years, preferring to remain in his house in the Peak District than to be looked after in a care home.

Poet and Write Out Loud reviewer Steven Waling adds: First Lee Harwood, then Tom Raworth, now Roy Fisher… All my poetic yardsticks are dying. Roy Fisher was probably one of my earliest influences to turn me toward that much disputed territory of literature, the ‘experimental poetry’ world.

His work is often witty, often anarchic, and veers from urban description to surrealism to cut-ups. His poetry was as various and changeable as the man himself was diffident, often shy and slippery, not much given to putting himself forward. In fact, for many years, he was almost invisible, his reputation always on the point of disappearing. And yet he would come out of the woodwork with the brilliant intensity of his masterpiece, A Furnace, or his collection Birmingham River, then slip slowly back into the background where he preferred to live. He once confessed that finding out he had many more readers than he thought he had made him stop writing for an extended period.

I met him just the once, at a performance he gave at the Manchester poetry festival, with a showing of the Tom Pickard film Birmingham’s What I Think With, and he seemed a lovely man, but basically introverted and shy. He’ll be remembered for some of the most ambitious poetry of the last 70 years, from City to The Cut Pages, from his poems about Birmingham (his home city) to the later poems about Derbyshire, where he lived for 30-odd years. As he says in an early poem, “As he came near death, things grew shallower for us.”