collected poems

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Friday Poem – ‘FISH’ by Peter Finch

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘FISH’ by Peter Finch. Originally published in The Machineries of Joy (2020), it now features in Volume Two of his Collected Poems which was published in 2022.

The covers of Peter Finch's collected poems show mirrored image of a geometric pattern made of grey 3D hexagons. The text reads Peter Finch Collected Poems.

Peter Finch’s remarkable career spans over fifty years. He has been taking poetry to places it didn’t know it wanted to go from the beginning; blending the avant-garde, concrete, visual, sound, performance and more conventional forms to create something unique. His new two-volume Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Taylor, cement his reputation as one of Britain’s leading poets.

Volume One brings together work from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Volume Two focuses on the second half of Finch’s career with poems from later collections sitting alongside works from his prose books and those engraved in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings, particularly in his native Cardiff. Nerys Williams and Ian McMillan provide appreciative forewords to each volume.

FISH He wrote the things decades back He did them underwater He pulled them out like sonic fish, Dada hake, Bauhaus trout, Schwitters skate, Showed them to Ormond who shook his head. You’ve energy, Finch, but they’ll not put that on your grave. Flailing in the Welsh fog. This man punctuates using the chance methods of John Cage. Potato’s Potatoe’s Potatos. There are monkeys and there are typewriters and the two shouldn’t be allowed to mix. Your leaflet advertising your amateur magazine is a joke, is it not? Beer mats, they read better, boy. Bwthyn, Llanbradach, Cariad, Hiraeth, Pysgodyn. Finch has never used words like those. Vous êtes une nation poétique san concours4, dit Chopin, piling on the micro-particles sans son sea sip seeeeth yat rat ata ata ata ata aaaah tick tick tick ttttt ttttt tteeee. Chopin this is an incorrect claim. Wales is a nation of standard-stoppages engaging with pasteurised modernism forty years outside the frame. I sound now like Kingsley Amis, it’s come to this at last. Asked him once to send in a poem. Got a postcard back reading Mr Amis regrets but he cannot do as you ask. 4. You are a poetic nation without competition

Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.

The Machineries of Joy is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Peter Finch will be reading alongside Philip Gross at Seren First Thursday in Cardiff on Thursday 2nd March. Find out more here www.serenbooks.com/event/first-thursday-march-peter-finch-and-philip-gross.

Seren First Thursday March. Peter Finch and Philip Gross. In person and via Facebook Live. Thursday 2nd March 7:30pm GMT. Tickets £3 on the door on wach live on Facebook for free. Supported by Seren and Literature Wales.
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Friday Poem – ‘Politics of Water’ by Peter Finch

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Politics of Water’ by Peter Finch. Originally published in his 1996 collection Math, it now features in Volume One of his newly published Collected Poems.

This cover features a photo of a geometric concrete sculpture made up of hexagons. The text reads: Peter Finch Collected Poems One 1968-1997

Peter Finch’s remarkable career spans over fifty years. He has been taking poetry to places it didn’t know it wanted to go from the beginning; blending the avant-garde, concrete, visual, sound, performance and more conventional forms to create something unique. His new two-volume Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Taylor, cement his reputation as one of Britain’s leading poets.

This cover features a photo of a geometric concrete sculpture made up of hexagons. The text reads: Peter Finch Collected Poems Two 1997-2021

Volume One brings together work from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Volume Two focuses on the second half of Finch’s career with poems from later collections sitting alongside works from his prose books and those engraved in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings, particularly in his native Cardiff. Nerys Williams and Ian McMillan provide appreciative forewords to each volume.

POLITICS OF WATER there (here) are (were) places (pimples) in (on) Wales (wheels) I (we) don’t (can’t) go (gone) reservoirs (places) that (this) are (will be) the (a) subconscious (subterranean) (subtotal) (subliminal) (superfluous) (serenity) of (in) (on) a (the) people (people). Here (where) were (will be) pimples (scars) (gouges) (savage stripes) on (in) wheels (fields) (folds) I (you) (we) can’t (can) (cannot) gone (grown) (green) places (princes) (parsons) (people) this (those) will be (will not) a (the) subterranean (terminal) (termination) (treeless) invasion (inversion) in (of) the (the) people (person) (personal) (private) (so private) (so personal) (only) it is (never) not (yours) (mine) (moan) (theirs) (his) (hers) (ours) (whose) dig (dirge) (deep) (down) (down) (down)

Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.

We launched the Collected Poems at Jury’s Inn in Cardiff earlier this week. Watch the live stream recording on demand on our AM channel now amam.cymru/seren.

Photos by John Briggs.

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Friday Poem – ‘Young Summer’, Leslie Norris

Friday Poem Leslie Norris Young Summer

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Young Summer’ by the prize-winning poet, Leslie Norris.

Leslie Norris Complete Poems‘Young Summer’ is one of the many vivid and captivating poems to be brought together in the landmark Leslie Norris: The Complete Poems, and offers a vision of the poet poised between youth and manhood: ‘Forward is the only way to go’, he reluctantly admits.
The Complete Poems contains 300 of Norris’ poems in total, some previously unpublished, and reflects the sixty plus year publishing life of the late Leslie Norris, who died in 2007, aged 86. Norris was best known as a nature poet and elegist of passion and rare expression. Lyrical and individual, to his closely observed poems, each word weighted and in its correct place, Norris introduces a strong metaphysical element which makes the poems, as Edward Lucie-Smith noted, “much larger than the sum of their parts”.

 

Leslie Norris Friday Poem Young Summer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leslie Norris: The Complete Poems is available on the Seren website: £25.00

Join our free Book Club for 20% off every book you buy from us.

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘In September’, John Ormond

Friday Poem in September John Ormond

For this week’s Friday Poem we have ‘In September’ by John Ormond, from his Collected Poems, edited by Rian Evans. The poem was written for Glenys in celebration of their wedding anniversary, which fell on the 21st September. Since the two were married in 1946, that would have been 70 years ago.

John Ormond Collected PoemsPenned late on the night of the 20th of September, probably 1970, because he’d forgotten to buy a card, it was deemed by them both to be infinitely preferable. Memories of key moments in their courtship are woven into the lines, while the storm door was the big black outer door of their home in Conway Road. The poem appeared in various anthologies: one which pleased Ormond was the Almanacco internazionale dei Poeti 1975 (La Pergola Edizioni) containing the Italian translation ‘In Settembre’ by the eminent translator, poet and critic Roberto Sanesi.

 

In September

Again the golden month, still
Favourite, is renewed;
Once more I’d wind it in a ring
About your finger, pledge myself
Again, my love, my shelter,
My good roof over me,
My strong wall against winter.

Be bread upon my table still
And red wine in my glass; be fire
Upon my hearth. Continue,
My true storm door, continue
To be sweet lock to my key;
Be wife to me, remain
The soft silk on my bed.

Be morning to my pillow,
Multiply my joy. Be my rare coin
For counting, my luck, my
Granary, my promising fair
Sky, my star, the meaning
Of my journey. Be, this year too,
My twelve months long desire.

 

John Ormond: Collected Poems draws together all of Ormond’s work, including unpublished material. It includes notes and commentary of the poems, and a bibliography of Ormond’s prose writing, films and writing about him. An index of titles and first lines completes this essential book.

Buy your copy now: £14.99

Claim 20% off as a Seren Book Club member

 

 

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Friday Poem – Christmas Holiday

This week’s poem is from Alun Lewis’ Collected Poems. Merry Christmas!

Alun Lewis (1915-1944), the remarkable poet and story writer, died, aged 28, in Burma during the Second World War. Some critics see him as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others view him as the bridge between pre-war poets like Auden and Yeats to post-war poets such as Hughes and Gunn. He was born and raised in Depression-struck south Wales and, following degrees in history at Aberystwyth and Manchester, became a teacher there. Early in 1940, despite his pacifist inclinations he enlisted and, after long periods of training, joined the war in India.

Becoming a soldier galvanised Lewis’s writing. By 1944 he had written two collections of poems and one of short stories, all published to considerable acclaim. Firmly established with Keith Douglas as the leading writer of the Second World War, Lewis’s death in an accident while on active service was huge loss to English literature. This Collected Poems comprises a body of work which has endured and which transcends the label ‘war poetry’; it is complete in itself and full of promise of greater things.

Christmas Holiday

Big-uddered piebald cattle low
The shivering chestnut stallion dozes
The fat wife sighs in her chair
Her lap is filled with paper roses
The poacher sleeps in the goose-girl’s arms
Incurious after so much eating
All human beings are replete.

But the cock upon the dunghill feels
God’s needle quiver in his brain
And thrice he crows: and at the sound
The sober and the tipsy men
Jump out of the bed with one accord
And start the war again.

The fat wife comfortably sleeping
Sighs and licks her lips and smiles

But the goose-girl is weeping.

Order Alun Lewis’ Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – Post-Script: For Gweno

This week’s poem is another taken from WW2 writer Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems, to celebrate the launch of Dr. John Pikoulis’s latest biography, Alun, Gweno & Freda, which is now available to order from our website.

For more information about Alun Lewis and the ongoing centenary celebrations, be sure to check out the Alun Lewis website, Twitter and Facebook.

Post-Script: For Gweno

If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
‘He has forgotten me’.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side;
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.

Order Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – Finding a Fossil

Today’s poem is from John Ormond’s Collected Poems, edited by Rian Evans and introduced by Patrick McGuinness, which is due to be released next month.

John Ormond (1923-1990) is one of the remarkable generation of poets born in south Wales in the early 1920s which includes Dannie Abse and Leslie Norris. A journalist on Picture Post during its heyday in the 1940s, he was a friend of fellow Swansea writers Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, both of whom were key influences on a poetry of consistently high standards. A significant number of his poems, many of them elegiac, probe his Welsh roots, demonstrating an abiding concern with family and locality. Others focus on particular aspects of the natural world, seeking to capture their elusive quiddities. Stylistically, they vary from the extremely plain to the highly-wrought; are witty and ironic, paradoxical and conceited. Typically unsentimental, shapely and meticulously crafted, his are the poems of a sensibility which delights in explorations, probes complex themes and problematical areas of feeling, and refuses to settle for easy answers.

In addition to his writing Ormond had a distinguished career with BBC Wales as a director and producer of documentary films, which include studies of Welsh painters and writers such as Ceri Richards, Kyffin Williams, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis and R.S. Thomas. The insight and visual awareness which mark his films also inform his poetry, a selection of which was published in the Penguin Modern Poets series.

This Collected Poems edited by Rian Evans, draws together all of Ormond’s work, including unpublished material. It includes an Introduction by poet, novelist and critic Patrick McGuinness, notes and commentary of the poems re their geneses, backgrounds, allusions and meanings, and a bibliography of Ormond’s prose writing, films and writing about him. An index of titles and first lines completes this essential book.

Finding a Fossil

Maidenhair fern in flint;
An ancient accident
Shows me time’s imprint.

A leaf preserved and pressed
Between leaves of stone; crossed
Rest and unrest.

An image that grew green
Took ground in the rock grain:
Dark; now light again.

Luck interlaced each line
And dying vein with stone.
They return to the same sun.

The casual life of fronds,
Air and the tongues of friends;
Green begins, grey ends;

Except that remembered shapes
Live, and that at one’s lips
Love speaks as loves lapse.

Graftings (so fused in chance
Among cold stars that dance
Gestures of permanence)

Persist and contrive to invent
From fragment and element
A mindful firmament.

Pre-order a copy of John Ormond’s Collected Poems from our website.