Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 196
ISBN: 9781854114402
Publication date: November 20, 2007
Price: £9.99
Out of stock
A prolific, relentlessly inventive, provocative and often hilarious poet, Peter Finch has published over twenty volumes of verse, as well as prose, including the popular alternative guide books in Seren’s Real… series.This selection follows his popular Selected Poems (1987) with a choice of work from books published in the past twenty years.
“Since the early 1970s, Finch has been the principal innovator in Welsh poetry… he deserves a Welsh knighthood.” – Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
“a delight, continuously inventive, truthful, intelligent, as funny as Buster Keaton or Dafydd ap Gwilym, and as sad. I was reminded more often than not of Joyce and MacDiarmid, and of the linguistic high jinks – and indignation – on view in recent Scottish poetry. What lifts the pieces in Useful out of callow avant-gardeism is Finch’s admirable imagination and formal control. Buy it soonest.” – Independent on Sunday.
“I’m convinced that Finch is one of the most exciting poets writing today on these islands, pushing the idea of poetry out as far as it will go, stretching the elastic band to snapping point and beyond, far beyond. Finch is so good because of his constant need to create and recreate, and his refusal to accept barriers. We need more poets like him.” – Ian McMillan
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.
