try some samples:
Stats
St
David's Hall
The
Tao Of Dining
Building Business
The Wisdom of Age
A Well Proportioned
Panorama
The new book from Seren collects work since 1997. Peter Finch's take on the angst of post-modern urban man is available from the first poem here, Stats, an irreverent collection of the author's vital statistics. Finch keenly observes the dark forces that afflict us and then relentlessly skewers them with a quick wit or twists form to give us alternative versions, inflicting a random beauty on the stale or predictable. He fearlessly lampoons the cliché of Wales as a land of sheep and song and exposes the tedious horrors of business-speak and bureaucracy, while his poems on relationships are paradoxically tender and enigmatic, as much about the gaps and elisions of love as the poignant absurdities of strong feelings.
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.
Finch has remained true to his double-headed vision of the world - seen through both modernist and anti-modernist eyes. There are visual poems here, text messages from Ffynnon Denis, the Mabinogi translated, his OULIPO versions of contemporary mores, his re-edit of the laws governing the establishment of the Welsh Assembly, his errata for Irish visitors, his vision of how age purrs in, and and rattles the parts of his life.In Food the multi-talented and endlessly inventive Peter Finch has produced an unmissable new collection of poems.
Food is published by Seren Books
paperback. 1-85411-296-1 £6.95.
to order click hereor e-mail Peter Finch: archive at peterfinch dot co dot uk
The launch at waterstones. Photo: John Briggs
