Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 92
ISBN: 9781854110572
Publication date: March 1, 1991
Price: £5.95
Ever wondered if there was another way of doing it? Poems for Ghosts takes up where Peter Finch’s Selected Poems left off. A compendium of modernist plunder, this is no collection for lovers of the traditionally tame.
Sound poems, found poems, straight poems. hooliganism restructured, protests at the ruination of heritage, passionate pleas for language. These are innovations, literate blasts, performances.
Finch wittily re-arranges our perception of poetry: kippers rub shoulders with Dutchmen, out at the edge America vanishes, the rain falls steadily on our sheep-filled hills. Who else could have suggested that the Welsh might have invented dada?
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.
