Friday Poem – 'FISH' by Peter Finch

Seren Books

Feb 24

This week's Friday Poem is 'FISH' by Peter Finch. Originally published in The Machineries of Joy (2020), it now features in Volume Two of his Collected Poems which was published in 2022.

The covers of Peter Finch's collected poems show mirrored image of a geometric pattern made of grey 3D hexagons. The text reads Peter Finch Collected Poems.

Peter Finch's remarkable career spans over fifty years. He has been taking poetry to places it didn't know it wanted to go from the beginning; blending the avant-garde, concrete, visual, sound, performance and more conventional forms to create something unique. His new two-volume Collected Poems, edited by Andrew Taylor, cement his reputation as one of Britain's leading poets.

Volume One brings together work from long lost chapbooks, broadsheets and limited editions, as well as more conventionally published work. Volume Two focuses on the second half of Finch's career with poems from later collections sitting alongside works from his prose books and those engraved in the public realm on sculptures, walls and buildings, particularly in his native Cardiff. Nerys Williams and Ian McMillan provide appreciative forewords to each volume.

FISH He wrote the things decades back He did them underwater He pulled them out like sonic fish, Dada hake, Bauhaus trout, Schwitters skate, Showed them to Ormond who shook his head. You've energy, Finch, but they'll not put that on your grave. Flailing in the Welsh fog. This man punctuates using the chance methods of John Cage. Potato's Potatoe's Potatos. There are monkeys and there are typewriters and the two shouldn't be allowed to mix. Your leaflet advertising your amateur magazine is a joke, is it not? Beer mats, they read better, boy. Bwthyn, Llanbradach, Cariad, Hiraeth, Pysgodyn. Finch has never used words like those. Vous êtes une nation poétique san concours4, dit Chopin, piling on the micro-particles sans son sea sip seeeeth yat rat ata ata ata ata aaaah tick tick tick ttttt ttttt tteeee. Chopin this is an incorrect claim. Wales is a nation of standard-stoppages engaging with pasteurised modernism forty years outside the frame. I sound now like Kingsley Amis, it's come to this at last. Asked him once to send in a poem. Got a postcard back reading Mr Amis regrets but he cannot do as you ask. 4. You are a poetic nation without competition

Order the Collected Poems Complete Set on the Seren website for £30.00, or buy them individually for £19.99 each.

The Machineries of Joy is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Peter Finch will be reading alongside Philip Gross at Seren First Thursday in Cardiff on Thursday 2nd March. Find out more here www.serenbooks.com/event/first-thursday-march-peter-finch-and-philip-gross.