Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854112965
Publication date: May 21, 2001
Price: £6.95
Out of stock
In Food the multi-talented and endlessly inventive Peter Finch keenly observes the dark forces that afflict us and then relentlessly skewers them with a quick wit, or twists form to give alternative versions, inflicting a random beauty on the stale or predictable.
He fearlessly lampoons the cliches of Wales and exposes the tedious horrors of international business-speak and bureaucracy. Paradoxically his poems on relationships are tender and enigmatic, as much about the gaps and elisions of love as the poignant absurdities of strong feeling.
Peter Finch
Peter Finch is a poet, writer, performer, walker and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff. He has been a publisher, organisation manager, periodical editor, event organiser, literary agent and literary promoter. He was at the forefront of the UK’s small press revolution in the 60s and the 70s with his magazine Second Aeon and pioneered performance poetry in Wales during the 1980s. From 1974 to 1995 he ran the Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. From 1996 to 2011 he was Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy, an organisation which was later rebranded as Literature Wales.
He specialises in books about the Welsh capital including the successful Real Cardiff series (4 volumes, most recently Real Cardiff: The Flourishing City), Edging The Estuary and its companion Edging The City, and The Roots Of Rock From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back. He has also written books in collaboration with photographer John Briggs: Walking The Valleys and Walking Cardiff.
If Finch is anything from all the above he is also a poet. His numerous poetry titles include Zen Cymru, Useful, Poems for Ghosts, Food and Selected Later Poems and The Machineries of Joy from Seren, Antibodies from Stride, and Vizet, a selected poems in Hungarian from Kronkét Könyvek. Important work from across the last fifty years were brought together in his two volume Collected Poems which was published by Seren in 2022.
