Peter Finch: What the Critics Say

• 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.
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• "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
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• "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 in Wales In Action, Spring 2005
  
  
• Finch's "way with echoes, loops, chiasmus, systems, repetitions etc is tremendous on stage, always a sensation to watch...."
  Chris McCabe, Poetry Librarian, (on Finch's 2009 performance at the ICA)
  
  

• "For once believe a blurb. Peter Finch's umpteenth collection is marked by all the 'restless energy, humour and angst' it says it is. He is prolific and indestructible"
  Andrew Stibbs, (on Useful), The North
  
  

• Vigorous, mind-opening and bracing as a Hokusai wave...Welsh writing needs the alternative energy of Peter Finch
  Ros Moule, BWA
  
  
• doesn't so much challenge the reader as utter menaces
  Christopher Meredith, (on Food), Thumbscrew
  

• Finch is never dull....he is intelligent, irreverent and often genuinely funny
  Vernon Scannell, Ambit
  
  

• Just this side of chaos
  Jon Gower
  
  

• ....almost a wave by himself.....
  Victor Golightly, NWR
  

• ...challenging and perplexing but rarely boring...
  John Williams, Virtual Vagabond
  
  
• ....the enfant terrible/white knight of the establishment .....
  Parthian Books Web Site
  

• Peter Finch has continued to be the outstanding, if not the only, representative of the avant-garde in literature in Wales...The energy and inventiveness he brought to second aeon have not declined with the years and these qualities, along with verbal facility and wit have constantly characterised his poetry.
  Sam Adams, PN Review
  
  
• Somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Nigel Molesworth ...
  Zoe Skouldlding, (on Food), Skald
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• there’s no-one writing quite like him in Wales, despite the emergence of younger urban poets in Cardiff and Swansea.
  John Barnie, (on Food), Gwales.Com
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• vintage Finch – ideas so good you can't think why you didn’t think of them first, and their the execution so stylish and graceful you are glad that you didn’t, that it’s Finch who developed them with customary panache.
  Jane Routh, (on Food), Stride Magazine
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• For a few years we shared an interest in experimental poetry and he went on to produce texts and tapes which shocked some of our more conservative critics.
  I know one who still refers to Peter Finch as "bardd ofer", "a pointless poet".
  That seems to me a harsh view of a man who marches to a different drum and who is willing to stretch the bounds of poetry as far as they will go. There may be something of Buster Keaton or Alfred Jarry about his work, but the fact that it makes us grin doesn't mean that he isn't serious in what he does.
  Meic Stephens, (on Food), Western Mail
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• consistently produces the most exciting, original and technically innovative poetry around
  Claire Powell, (on Food), Poetry Salzburg
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• the man's so on top of his game, it seems he's taking the mick.....
  David Woolley, (on Food), The David Jones Journal
  
  

• Its consistent tone is notable for its wryness, the mocking response of a mature, and slightly world weary man who can tell a hawk from a handsaw
  Poetry Nottingham International
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• Finch tinkers with your brain, sets out to deconstruct pre-set notions about what poetry is, what we expect to find, and then, he delivers, takes you there.
  Sarah Corbett, (on Food), New Welsh Review
  
  
• Reading some of Peter Finch's work is like reading the bog walls of a superior university - this is a compliment.
  Michael Bangerter, (on Food), Iota
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• The leading (and, at times, virtually the only!) avant-garde poet writing in Wales. His output has been prodigious.
  from Peter Finch Sounds Off: Claire Powell's critical analysis.
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• A defiant individualist, restlessly pushing words beyond their given forms and meanings to say new things in new ways about our complicated knife-edge times
  Nigel Jenkins, Western Mail
  

• Peter Finch is an urban poet, trailing contemporary troubles with bitter brio
  Graham Allen, New Welsh Review
  

• ...clever, technically accomplished poems.....
  Mario Basini, (on Useful), Western Mail
  
  
• This is a lot more enjoyable than 20 volumes of RS Thomas, and says roughly the same things.
  Andrew Duncan, (on Make), pinko.org
  

• not recommended for the poetically conservative...
  Planet, (on Antibodies)
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• strictly for addicts, masochists and freewheeling bohemians who like to shake a leg in suburbia.
  The Independent on Sunday, (on Antibodies)
  
  
• Each poem is a tiny artificial world, but the rate which ideas arrive and depart is relentless.
  Andrew Duncan, (on Antibodies), pinko.org
  
  
• His work also makes a strong case for the relevance of experimental poetry beyond the purely modern.
  Jake Berry, (on Antibodies), M.A.G.
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• What is modern? Nothing more so than the mind of Peter Finch. The mixture is heady and effective - making for work which is far more adventurous than much so called modern poetry that often seems trapped and hungover in its bedsit, bleating about the opposite sex.
  Adrian Buckner (on Useful), Poetry Nottingham
  

• This is a book I have consistently recommended from the time it first appeared, and nothing that has appeared since has changed my mind. It is comprehensive, sensible, and accurate. For an extra quid you get all that experience, 50% more pages, and a quote from the editor of ORBIS. What more could you ask? It's no contest, really.
  Mike Shields in Orbis comparing How To Publish Your Poetry with a contemporary upstart.
  

• Peter Finch packs his book with both sound advice and knowledgeable asides. Indeed, for anyone involved in any capacity with the current poetry scene, it's an interesting read in its own right. And, if the test of any How To... book is that one learns something new from it, then in my case Peter Finch's passed on two counts.
  Sam Smith in Zene on How To Publish your Poetry
  

• "He cleaned up and paid people"
  Overheard comment
  

• There is a feeling in Antibodies of being invited - challenged - to use the work to reach one's own vision. It is difficult and exciting reading
  Dee Rimbaud, Chapman
  

• A writer who relishes living where two languages interface and become estranged from themselves
  M Wynn Thomas, Corresponding Cultures, UWP

• I was lucky enough to catch Peter Finch, Welsh performance poet, poetry activist, editor and impresario (he's been central to the Welsh poetry underground scene since the 60s), at a show last week, and was blown away. Wild, witty, staccato and with a voice that hints of Hopkins' Hannibal with a velvet edge, he was doing "tens" without trying. His book Selected Poems is a good place to start
  Todd Swift, in Hungary's virtual magazine @gent

• Experimental, accessible and sometimes very funny, Peter Finch's poetry is only one part of this voluminous site. It is also a personal biography, a collection of reviews, a great collection of links to other poetry sites and a place in which Finch provides excerpts from his excellent guides to self-publishing.
  CTI Centre for Textural Studies web site approving of the Peter Finch Archive
  
  
• Finch invests these forgotten margins of the capital with the same compelling desolation as that bestowed by Dickens upon the Essex marshes
  Grahame Davies, (on Real Cardiff), New Welsh Review
  
  
• The man is like Alka-Seltzer. His words (and sounds) fly at you and fizz in your face.....Breathless and manic with dramatic pedigree, and funnnier than most stand-ups, Finch's 'intros' had the audience howling at every turn.
  John Elcock, (on a last Thursday performance at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea), Roundyhouse.
  
  
• His diglossic satire on Welsh icons of national identity erupts with energy in the use of Welsh and English idiom in the same phrase: 'rudin wedi dysgu hen ddigon ol'moldering / Welsh Saunders Mabinignog crap'.
  Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited, Welsh Writing In English, University of Wales Press 2004
  
  
• I have to say that I do rejoice when sublime nonsense is on the menu, as it is in Food. This book is six pounds ninety five pee worth of hilarity.
  John Hartley Williams, Seven Sails: Sailing towards a retrospective - Seren 25 Years, Poetry Wales, January, 2006.
  
  
• A collection of 'texts' that Peter Finch, our boldest surreaist, has constructed and then deconstructed, often to astonishing effect.......But beware: this is not a book to give your auntie, unless she too is a dadaist.
  Meic Stephens (on The Welsh Poems), Cambria, 2006
  
  
• These poems are well travelled indeed. This is Finch's best book so far.
  Rupert Loydell (on The Welsh Poems), Stride Magazine, 2006
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• This new collection from Peter Finch is a real pleasure. His poetry inhabits an old border of the English language, permeated with Welsh sources, literature, history and place, fraying into Welsh or deeper into the common realm of sound where distinctions between languages dissolve. From this interesting position Finch continues to mine the rich seams of experimentalism, which if The Welsh Poems are anything to go by, are far from exhausted.
  Jamie Wilkes (on The Welsh Poems), Intercapillary Space, 2006
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• A cinch for Sheers, Abse and Finch
  headline in Western Mail, July 2006
  
  
• There is something oddly likable about the first half of the book where he works "the oven / with its roaring fan and gargled heat" to produce a language which melts and liquefies in the grasp; but which poses serious questions about our understanding of that language and about what the power relationships between us and the world really are.
  Nigel McLoughlin (on The Welsh Poems), Poetry Review, Autumn 2006
  
  
• What is evident from this collection is Peter Finch's sustained engagement with the languages and ideolects of Wales and his questioning of ideas of monolithic tradition....(The Welsh Poems) can be read as a chronicle of a lifetime's engagement with poetry, poetics and the poetry business.
  Nerys Williams (on The Welsh Poems), Planet, 2006
  
  
• Finch's performance is assured and dramatic. The poem's use of assonance, dissonance and alliteration, especially on the sibilants, builds almost to distortion. The poem literally hisses, fizzes and buzzes
  Writing in Education, 2007 discussing Finch's contribution to iPoems
  
  
• Those who prefer poems that maintain clear surfaces will surely find beauty in this poet’s diction. “Language music haunted stillness”.
  Sarah Kennedy (on The Welsh Poems), West Review, 2008
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• "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 (on Selected Later Poems) in Poetry Wales Vol 43 No 3, Jan 2008
  
  
• "Peter Finch is a fine psychogeograoher, a consummate chronicler of place both literal and etheral, able to chop words with gleeful precision.... Real Wales is a reminder that he who first cooked up the concept remains its sharpest protagonist."
  - Mike Parker (on Real Wales) in New Welsh Review #84, May, 2009
  
  
  

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