Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 495
ISBN: 9781781726709
Publication date: May 30, 2022
Price: £19.99
Foreword by Nerys Williams
The two volumes of Peter Finch’s Collected Poems chart the course of a remarkable writing career. After reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as a young man Finch was inspired to become a poet, founded Second Aeon magazine and publishing house, and become a poetry entrepreneur, bringing to all these things an unquenchable vitality which set him apart in contemporary poetry.
This first volume makes available poems from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Here are concrete poems, sound poems, typographical poems, visual poems, poems in cartoon form or as crumpled photocopies. Whatever their form, Finch’s poems are always vivid and alive, pulsing with inventive energy. As he says himself, this is work which pushes the idea on until it breaks, flowers, or dissolves. It means that Finch’s writing can never be taken for granted.
The Collected Poems is also a restless exploration of the ideas behind the poems. It is a testament to the experimental in literature, to ways of pushing boundaries and doing it differently, and to an alternative modernist culture in Wales and Britain. Consequently, invaluably, they also open a window on a poetry scene seemingly lost from view to the twenty-first century. They remind us that there was interesting and vital writing happening outside of what has calcified into the canon of twentieth century British poetry. And that Finch was at its cutting edge.
Editor Andrew Taylor has included an informative Introduction, a timeline of Finch’s artistic activity, and helpful notes. The book is completed by poet Nerys Williams’ appreciative Foreword.
Find out more about Volume Two: 1997–2021
Also available as a Complete Set for just £30.00
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.
Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool born poet, critic, academic and editor. He is the author of three collections of poetry published by Shearsman Books: Radio Mast Horizon (2013), March (2017) and Not There-Here (2021). He is the author of Adrian Henri: A Critical Reading (2019), the first critical book on the poetry of Henri.
Taylor is editor of M58 an online blogzine that publishes other poetries, and a founder editor of erbacce magazine and erbacce-Press. His criticism appears in magazines such as Orbis, The Journal, Stride and In Other Words: Merida. His poetry has been published in places such as Poetry Wales, The Morning Star, Shearsman, Ambit, International Times, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stride. He has collaborated with visual artists, Edward Chell and Julie Jones, musician and writer, Nick Power (Lowdeine Chronicles 2019) and poet Charlie Baylis, (at first it felt like flying 2019).
He lives in Nottingham and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English and course leader for the BA (Hons.) Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Higher Education Academy. He gained his PhD in Poetry and Poetics under the supervision of Professor Robert Sheppard.
He edited Peter Finch’s two volume Collected Poems.
“Finch has always been and still is, experimental, with a daring and intelligent imagination that is enviable. He’s always been a poet who lifts up, and off, into airy new terrain… Finch-like. Finchian. A must-read collection, of course.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
‘This is a beautiful work that draws you in to full immersion’
Matthew M.C. Smith
“For 40 years he has been the Welsh avant-garde, as inventive and as indispensable as he has been consistently undervalued and ignored… one of the few Welsh writers capable of entrancing young students with his verbal chutzpah, his Crazy Gang of words. Henffych, Peter: a hir oes eto i’ch egni ac i’ch dawn.”
M. Wynn Thomas
“It is questionable, ridiculous, subversive, terrific, unique poetry which cannot be snared, trapped or caged; yet Taylor and Seren have charmed it on to the pages of this generous, rain-filled, assertive, definitive collection. I look forward to volume three.”
Tears in the Fence
“Finch’s legacy is to create substance from nothing, to defy our knowledge of decay and disappearance with vibrancy, sly humour and indefatigable energy.”
Wales Arts Review
“…this collection is a delight. A gallimaufry. A compendium of forms. A dictionary of discovery. A mixtape of marvels. A variorum of voices.”
Steven Waling, Litter Magazine
“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
“The publication of his collected poems in two big juicy volumes will delight readers new and old.”
Western Mail
Peter Finch launching his Collected Poems in a Cardiff, in May 2022. The live stream of the event is available to watch on our AM channel, thanks to our partners Culture Colony.
Photographs by John Briggs.
