{"title":"Books by Peter Finch","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781781726716","title":"Collected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe two volumes of Peter Finch’s \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e chart the course of a remarkable writing career. After reading Allen Ginsberg’s \u003ci\u003eHowl\u003c\/i\u003e as a young man Finch was inspired to become a poet, found the \u003ci\u003eSecond Aeon\u003c\/i\u003e magazine and publishing house, and become a poetry entrepreneur, bringing to all these things an unquenchable vitality which set him apart in contemporary poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis second volume includes poems from the ‘second half’ of Finch’s career, in which his poems also appeared in his prose books, and in public places on sculptures and buildings particularly in his native Cardiff. Yet still the poems continued to ‘operate at the far edges of what poetry is understood to be’. Although the poetry landscape of Britain has changed since Finch’s first published poem in 1968, his desire to experiment, to question what constitutes a poem, and to challenge orthodoxy has remained both undiminished and relevant.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e 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 now 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEditor Andrew Taylor has included an informative Introduction, a timeline of Finch’s artistic activity, and helpful notes. The book is completed by poet Ian McMillan’s perceptive Foreword.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304043196789,"sku":"9781781726716","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781726716_0dd5aa9f-4a8d-4ac9-b04c-1096d8d8085b.jpg?v=1786025702"},{"product_id":"9781781726761","title":"Edging the City","description":"\u003cp\u003ePeter Finch is perhaps the foremost chronicler of Cardiff, past and present. His response to the 2020 lockdown covid restrictions confining people to their local authority area was to begin walking the boundary of his, in a repeat of his long walk along the south Wales coast recorded in \u003ci\u003eEdging the Estuary\u003c\/i\u003e. The Cardiff border rarely appears on maps. The city is no longer has walls (like York or Chester), or a modern transport périphérique like London’s M25. Instead it’s metaphorical dotted line travels across fields, along motorways, up rivers, through forests, over rail tracks and along miles of intertidal mudflats following the edge of the Severn. The border is made up of waymarked trails, city streets, highway liminal zones, woodlands. Mud-soaked tracks up hillsides, bridges, diversions, disentanglements and discoveries all play a part in this informative text created for walkers and armchair travellers alike.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eEdging the City\u003c\/i\u003e explores (sometimes literally) why and where borders exist, their purposes, their love of water courses. It discusses other cities with walkable borders including York, Chester, London, Paris, Bruges and Seoul. It considers legal and geopolitical reasons for borders (the battles over placement of ‘Welcome’ signs, for instance), how they change and what happens when politics crosses boundaries. Cardiff’s medieval and other boundaries are traced. The border is walked, run and sailed. Finch also eats his way around it, and provides textual diversions on crossing road, north Cardiff trees, words for mounds, the mountains of Cardiff, the city’s coalmines, its triads, and other apparent oddities. \u003ci\u003eEdging the City\u003c\/i\u003e is a view of Cardiff like no other, full of insights and discoveries.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304884973941,"sku":"9781781726761","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781726761_1aa153da-7870-4239-a7c2-aeb970e10447.jpg?v=1786025704"},{"product_id":"9781917140522","title":"The Literary Business","description":"\u003cp\u003eA handbook, a demystification and an intimate history of the wide literary world.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWritten with Peter Finch's characteristic good humour, \u003ci\u003eThe Literary Business\u003c\/i\u003e relates through bitingly well-observed vignettes how it is and how it was over the past six decades.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":57685807169909,"sku":"9781913830748","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":56309447164277,"sku":"9781917140522","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913830748_3b29c315-c1d9-4efa-8bd8-607f45cb7ad8.jpg?v=1792599001"},{"product_id":"9781781726709","title":"Collected Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe two volumes of Peter Finch’s \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e chart the course of a remarkable writing career. After reading Allen Ginsberg’s \u003ci\u003eHowl\u003c\/i\u003e as a young man Finch was inspired to become a poet, found the \u003ci\u003eSecond Aeon\u003c\/i\u003e magazine and publishing house, and become a poetry entrepreneur, bringing to all these things an unquenchable vitality which set him apart in contemporary poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEditor 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312814010741,"sku":"9781781726709","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781726709_db99d7f5-2377-451a-a5fa-e45836e8b229.jpg?v=1786025701"},{"product_id":"the-machineries-of-joy","title":"The Machineries of Joy","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMachineries of Joy\u003c\/i\u003e is the vibrant, uproarious, pointed and wildly entertaining new collection from renowned Cardiff-based performance poet, \u003cb\u003ePeter Finch\u003c\/b\u003e. Known for his inventive and multi-faceted formal strategies and his best-selling psycho-geographical peregrinations around Wales and the USA,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinch gives us the world in all its contemporary complexity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57487712747893,"sku":"9781781725658","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781725658.jpg?v=1786354938"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-peter-finch.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}