Books by Peter Finch

A complete bibliography. Titles listed here can be ordered through Amazon, direct from their publishers or, in cases of difficulty, by e-mail from the Peter Finch Archive. Details here.
Real Cardiff #1

Cardiffian Peter Finch discovers the real Cardiff: lost rivers, Roman forts, holy wells, itinerant poets, the old race course, the revitalised city centre, the redeveloped Cardiff Bay, as he travels the city from east to west and north to south. All Cardiff is here - not just the tourist destinations. The estates of Ely and Grangetown sit next to elegant Radyr and Lisvane; the new bars jostle with the old pubs; the terraces of Splott stand by the grandeur of the castle and the civic centre.

What do visitors make of the place? Meet the Japanese tourist puzzling over Castell Coch; get banned from the pubs of Llandaff with novelist George MacBeth; listen to the Beat poets in town. Meet the locals too, with their mix of diffidence and civic pride.

And see how Cardiff is changing, from Finch's youth in the sixties to the chrome and glass of today; from capital city to seat of government; from thriving docks and steelmaking to call centres and the new tourism.This is offbeat topographical writing, peppered with Finch's poems, which will enthrall the native, the visitor and the armchair traveller alike. It's celebratory, it's subversive. It's Real Cardiff.
2nd edition, third printing. isbn 1854113852. Published by Seren Books, paperback, £9.95. Purchase. More information.

Real Cardiff Two - The Greater City

Here Peter Finch crosses the larger city, hunts for the legendary periferique and discovers rubbish dumps, walled housing estates and dead-end lanes. He walks the coast around Penarth Head and on to Lavernock to find the terminal beach at Sully. With poet Grahame Davies he hunts for the mythical river Canna and uncovers what makes Cardiff media-land tick. With Architect Jonathan Adams he trails where the walls of Cardiff once ran, looking for time vaults and gaps in the city's space-time continuum.

How did Penarth's Billy Banks get their name? Why are there so many pubs in Pontcanna? Is it Victoria Park or Canton? Who knows? Not Finch's mother, that's for sure. With John Briggs he walks the route of the Glamorgan Canal, mourning the city's loss. Russell Goodway agrees with him. But he's lost too, now.

In the Bay he looks at what went before the new Wales Millennium Centre and what might have been. Out at Creigiau he finds cromlechau and extant past in a city full of trees and slopes. The welsh Office is surrounded with salt to keep the demons out. John Tripp has his wake at the Gower in Cathays. There's a folk-club in the Locomotive along Broadway. Queen Street Station has passages you can't get to where the Taff Valley Railway still steams. There are other secrets running inside the overbuilt city. Finch tells us what they are.

In Real Cardiff #2 Finch no longer has his nose pressed against the glass. This time he's inside.
isbn 1854113844. Seren Books, paperback, £9.99. Purchase. More information.

Real Cardiff Three - Coming in 2009

Real Wales - Coming for autumn 2008

In the latest ambitious offering from the Real... series, following acclaim for Real Cardiff and Real Cardiff Two, Finch takes on the alien land he didn't know was his, until he grew and went to see it: Real Wales. A cotton-wool nation, full of football and big-brother slim-screen television, or a land of demons, where white robed druids would wail at you through a never ending mist?

In muscular, syncopated and witty prose, Finch presents 30 years of journeys through the familiar, the bizarre, and to all those places on the TV weather map he never before had cause to visit.

In a country of small and scattered populations, who are all certain of who they are, and where doubt is a quality none possess, Finch comes across poetry in Merthyr, an abandoned castle in Dinas Powys, UFOs and Waldo Williams in West Wales, Jack Kerouac on the beach at Gwbert, the military at Epynt, bizarre sports in Llanwrtyd, flying gravy in Cricieth, panic on Snowdon, and a stripper at the Royal Welsh.

Whether reading a mountain as Braille or clearing a tent at Hay with one poem, Finch seeks to embrace the permanently stern independence of spirit he sees across the country. Personal but never pedestrian, in a country where the past is so near the surface but can never quite be picked up, he accompanies oddballs and novelists, historians and local experts, to find something usually forgotten in a world of oil-powered multi-national commercial empires and federal enormity: Small is beautiful.

Seren Books. Due for publications Autumn 2008

The Big Book of Cardiff

An exciting anthology of new writing from Europe's newest Capital. The modern, the post-modern, the urban, the post-industrial city that has come into being since the 1980s. Editors Peter Finch and Grahame Davies select the best from the city's writers. Brand new for autumn 2005 - Cardiff's centenary year. More information

Seren Books. ISBN: 1854113984; Ł9.99. Purchase at Amazon.

Selected Later Poems

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. More information.

Seren Books. ISBN: 9781854114402; £9.99. Purchase at Amazon

The Welsh Poems

The Welsh Poems might also be called Selected Experimental Poems and highlights Finch's more unusual excursions into verbal and visual trickery. The book covers work written over a period of two decades and is the first such large-scale selection of his work. More information.

Shearsman Books. ISBN 0-907562-91-4. Ł9.95. Purchase at Amazon

Food
The new Finch title from Seren collects work since 1997. Food - the stuff that keeps us moving on. Not only does the collection include poems on dining, eating, preparing and thinking about food but Finch's verse sequence on walking - the perfect post-prandial activity - endemic in his life. The hills, coasts, rocks and heart-stop climbs are all here. Test Finch out on the world seen through haiku. See where William Carlos Williams had led him. Spend money in Soviet Russia. Hang around outside a concert at St David's Hall. There is a maturity in his handling of life and increasing engagement with death. His range is as wide as ever. The vital mix of humour, heart wrench, diatribe, and experimentation remains. More information.

Seren Books. ISBN 1854112961. £6.95. Purchase at Amazon

Useful
"Peter Finch's new collection is marked by all the restless energy, humour and angst that is so characteristic of this compulsively entertaining poet. Among the varied subjects to come under the poet's subversive scrutiny are: Contemporary Art, the Blues, computers, automobiles, ex-wives, recalcitrant children, aged parents, bleak Welsh landscapes, factory workers, writing classes, old shirts and beach stones. His continuing fascination with technique is highlighted in the poems of the second half of the collection which include a short section of visual pieces as well as the elaborate code of 'One of Our Presidents: Six variations for Tony Conran'. Also here are poems written for particular performances or directly inspired by works of art. A tireless innovator, an astute and frequently very funny observer of culture and society, Peter Finch will win yet more readers with Useful" - from the blurb. Published by Seren Books, 1997. More information. Read the reviews

Seren Books. ISBN 1854111760. Ł6.95. Purchase at Amazon .

Antibodies
"In Antibodies Peter Finch works on language from the inside defamiliarising through gestalt, process, list, and structure. The work uses chance as much as design, relies on visual perception as much as the internal voice. It forever echoes Coolidge's question 'why make new work when there is so much already around us?' The lines travel clear up from Dada to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. With the exception, of course, that Finch wants us to enjoy ourselves as we read and explore."
- from the blurb. Published by Stride, 1997. More information. Read the reviews.

Stride. ISBN 1900152223. Ł7.95. Purchase at Amazon

More Finch Titles: Poetry

Wanted For Writing Poetry (with Steve Morris)- Second Aeon, 1968
Pieces Of The Universe - Second Aeon, 1969
Cycle Of the Suns - Art Living,1970
Beyond The Silence - Vertigo, 1970
An Alteration In The Way I Breathe - Quickest way Out, 1970
The Edge Of Tomorrow (with Jeanne Rushton) - BB Books, 1971
The End Of The Vision - (hard and paper editions) - John Jones Ltd, 1971
Whitesung - Aquila, 1972
Antarktika - Writers Forum, 1972
Trowch Eich Radio 'Mlaen - Writers Forum, 1977
Connecting Tubes - Writers Forum, 1980
Visual Texts 1970-1980 - (microfiche edition) Pyrofiche, 1981
The O Poems - Writers Forum, 1981
Blues And Heartbreakers - Galloping Dog, 1981
Some Music And A Little War - Rivelin Grapheme, 1984
On Criticism - Writers Forum, 1984
Reds In The Bed - Galloping Dog, 1985
Selected Poems - Poetry Wales Press, 1987
Make - Galloping Dog, 1990
Cheng Man Ching Variations - Writers Forum, 1990
Poems For Ghosts - Seren Books, 1991
Five Hundred Cobbings - Writers Forum, 1994
The Spe ell - Writers Forum, 1995
Useful - Seren Books,1997 - more information
Dauber - Writers Forum, 1997
Antibodies - Stride, 1997 - more information
Food - Seren Books, 2001- more information
Vizet - Water - Konkret Konyvek, 2003 - more information
The Welsh Poems - Shearsman, 2006 - more information
Selected Later Poems - Seren, 2007 - more information
Zen Cymru - Seren (due 2009)

Tapes

Big Band Dance Music - Balsam Flex, 1980
Dances Interdites - Balsam Flex, 1982
The Italian Job (with Bob Cobbing) - Klinker Soundz, 1985

Other Works

Blats - Second Aeon, 1973
Between 35 And 42 - Alun Books, 1982
Getting Your Poetry Published (15 editions) - Association of Little Presses, 1973
Publishing Yourself, Not Too Difficult After All (8 editions) - Association of Little Presses, 1989
How To Publish Your Poetry (3 editions) - Allison & Busby, 1985
How To Publish Your Poetry (complete revision) - read a sample chapter - Allison & Busby, April, 1998
How To Publish Yourself (two editions) - Allison & Busby, 1987
How To Publish Yourself (complete revision) - read a sample chapter Allison & Busby, December 1997
The Poetry Business - Seren Books, 1994
Real Cardiff - Seren Books - 2002
Real Cardiff #2 - Seren Books - 2004
Real Wales - Seren Books - due 2008 - read samples
Real Cardiff #3 - Seren Books - due 2009

As Editor
Typewriter Poems - Something Else Press, 1972
How To Learn Welsh - Christopher Davies 1978
Green Horse (with Meic Stephens) - Christopher Davies, 1978
Small Presses & Little Magazine Of The UK & Ireland, An Address List - Oriel Bookshop, 1996
The Big Book of Cardiff (with Grahame Davies) - Seren 2005 - more information
Orbis Magazine Special Welsh Issue - #136 - 2006

Series Editor
For Seren Books: The Real Wales series. Coming soon Real Newport (Ann Drysdale), Real Swansea (Nigel Jenkins), Real Wrexham (Grahame Davies), Real Aberystwyth (Niall Griffiths), Real Merthyr (Mario Basini), Real South Pembroke (Tony Curtis), Real Llanelli (Jon Gower), and Real Liverpool (Niall Griffiths)

How To Order

Peter Finch's Books can be ordered through your local bookshop, through Seren or through Amazon. The purchase through Amazon links will take you directly to Amazon and offer you a number of purchasing opportunities. Some of these will include signed copies directly from the author. In cases of difficulty can be supplied by direct mail from this website.

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