Collected Poems

The two volumes of Peter Finch’s Collected Poems chart the course of a remarkable writing career. After reading Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as a young man Finch was inspired to become a poet, found the Second Aeon magazine and publishing house, and become a poetry entrepreneur, bringing to all these things an unquenchable vitality which set him apart in contemporary poetry.

This first volume makes available poems from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Here are concrete poems, sound poems, typographical poems, visual poems, poems in cartoon form or as crumpled photocopies. Whatever their form, Finch’s poems are always vivid and alive, pulsing with inventive energy. As he says himself, this is work which pushes the idea on until it breaks, flowers, or dissolves. It means that Finch’s writing can never be taken for granted.

The Collected Poems is also a restless exploration of the ideas behind the poems. It is a testament to the experimental in literature, to ways of doing it differently, and to an alternative modernist culture in Wales and Britain. Consequently, invaluably, they also open a window on a poetry scene seemingly lost from view to the twenty-first century. They remind us that there was interesting and vital writing happening outside of what has calcified into the canon of twentieth century British poetry. And that Finch was at its cutting edge with poets like Bob Cobbing and Henri Chopin Paul.

Editor Andrew Taylor has included an informative Introduction, a timeline of Finch’s artistic activity, and helpful notes. The book is completed by poet Nerys Williams’ appreciative Foreword.