Selected Later Poems

Seren Books
Paperback 225pp, £9.99
isbn 9781854114402

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from the blurb: Peter Finch - Selected Later Poems. A prolific, relentlessly inventive, provocative and often hilarious poet, Peter Finch has published over 20 volumes of verse, as well as prose, including the popular alternative guide books, Real Cardiff and Real Cardiff 2. This Selected Later Poems follows his popular 1987 Selected 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 Gwylym, 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." William Scammell, (on Useful), 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 Macmillan, (on Useful), Poetry Wales

Peter Finch is Chief Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. As a writer he works in both traditional and experimental forms. He is best known for his declamatory poetry readings, his creative work based on his native city of Cardiff and his encyclopedic knowledge of the UK poetry publishing scene. 225 pages £9.99.

"This book gathers together work from eight of Finch's previous collections. From the viceral immediacy of Make, the reader is drawn into a mesmeric experiment with form and language. In Sp ll, Finch plays with the brittle relationship between objects and signifiers, and develops his exploration of semiotics and meaning in Poems For Ghosts, where explodes the pomposity of formal, public language by crafting his own wildly funny and dark satire on the memes of officialdom."
- PBS Bulletin, winter 2007

"Peter Finch's poetry is riotously inventive on both language and poetic form....However, Finch's capacity to produce deeply serious work should not be ignored: he is a moving poet of loss and fragility.....Running to well over two hundred pages, this is a significant book, covering Finch's work from Make (1990) to The Welsh Poems (2006). As such, is is an extremely valuable record of a major contribution to an unrepresented poetic tendency within Wales.....a volume not to be missed."
- Matthew Jarvis in Poetry Wales Vol 43 No 3 - Jan 2008

"You would need to be a bit of a miserable sod not to be amused by it......almost every page offers something. different, And it's fun and you can't say that about a lot of poetry"
- Jim Burns in Ambit - April, 2008

"Running as it does to more than 200 pages, it's certainly not slight, but then neither, happily, is the content...... Peter Finch has now been publishing for forty years. Not many poets of his experience can still seem so fresh, vital and wide-ranging in their concerns and their methods - mercurial yet purposeful. This book, at once sunlit and pitch-black, does him real justice."
- Kathryn Gray in New Welsh Review No 81 - September, 2008

"...the sheer verve and quality of the work assembled in this volume is sufficient to challenge anyone out of their prejudices.....Selected Later Poems will further cement the reputation of Finch as a major presence in contemporary British poetry."
- Richard Marggraf-Turley in Planet No 189 - Autumn 2008

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Selected Later Poems - Contents

from make

Make
2.45 pm Warming
Opportunities
Piano
The Best gesture
Running A reading
Letter
Music
Journal
Island

from Poems For Ghosts

Roofer
3 am
We Can Say That
Out At The Edge
Mountains: Sheep
Hunting Whitakers For The Answer To Poetry
Language
Kipper On The Lips
Dead End
Little Mag
Dutch
Ex-Smokes Man Writes Epic
Hills
Form
Wales For Americans
The 1930s British Board Of Censors Script-Vetting Unit Reports
Severn Estuary ABC

from the spp ell

The Demons Project (extract)

 

from Antibodies

Blodeuwedd Translated
History
Marigold Hands
Shock Of The New
Clatter
Sales Conference
Wet Singers
Young
from The Cheng Man Ch'ing Variations
from Five Hundred Cobbings
Lunch Time
Problems of Gravity
Antibodies
Automatism
Balloon
The Problem Of Success
Acknowledging Some Of The Sources

 

from Useful

Talk About Nice Things
Summer School
Heart
Fists
The Writer On Holiday With Two Teenagers Sends A Postcard Home
The Steps
Lambies
All I Need Is Three Plums
Meeting Her Lover
Takes Guts
Stone Clasps
The River
Walking
Partisan
The Exhibition
RNLD TOMOS
Sonnet No. 18
Written Out

from Food

Stats
The Tao of Dining
Words Beginning With A from the
Government's Welsh Assembly White Paper
The Student House
South Wales Haiku
Irish Guide To Wales Errata
St David's Hall
Some Christmas Haiku
Dinas Powis
Watkin Path
Ben Lomond
Building Business
Getting Through The Agenda
The Wisdom of Age
The Only Book Left In The House
Spending Money In Soviet Russia
Cookery Lesson
Well-Proportioned Panorama
Business
The Plums
Bus Stop
Good Names For Cats
Food Deprivation and Life Expectancy

from Real Cardiff

Mewn / Mas
Writers' Guidelines
Text Message From Ffynnon Denis
Lifting
Built On A Lost River - How Do You Know

 

from Real Cardiff Two

East Cardiff
Cardiff Arts (Old)
A Liberal Version of the
Penarth Sea Angling Club
List of Penarth Pier Fish

 

from The Welsh Poems

Fold
No Bike
Putting In The Window
Paint
Historians
Rhai Caneuon Cymreig
How
Instead Of Writing
Mardy Maerdy
Nothing Is New
Publishing
Repeat
Tunnel Gog
Rough Skin
Tea Room
Torrance
Swell

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