|
Food contains all the ingredients we’ve come to expect from Peter Finch – wordplay poems, found poems, list poems, haiku, manipulated photos, effortless free verse. Not exactly experimental in the avant-garde sense, though they sometimes pass for this in Wales, but a necessary part of the Finch poetic persona – the street-wise Cardiffian who looks on Wales with an amused eye, who refuses, on a point of principle, to be taken by surprise.
Typical are two satires on post-Thatcherite business mentality, ‘Building Business’ and ‘Getting Through the Agenda’. There’s a return to his periodic onslaught on R. S.’s vision of Wales in ‘Well-Proportioned Panorama’ in which ‘A Welsh Landscape’ is run through two French translation programmes:
Alive in Wales is informed
At dusk of an opposite blood
That has been going about as a manufactured savage sky product...
And a take on official Welsh culture in ‘St David’s Hall’, where the great and good emerging from a surreal, imagined concert are contrasted with ‘the kids’ getting pissed in a bar, ‘Welsher than R. S., louder than Iwan Bala’. (The poem creates opposites out of high art and popular culture, though it’s hard to see why we should be reduced to an either/or.)
There’s much to admire here, Peter Finch is on form, and there’s no-one writing quite like him in Wales, despite the emergence of younger urban poets in Cardiff and Swansea.
The poems that held me most, however, are in some ways uncharacteristically personal, a clutch of half a dozen lyrics plotting the decline of his mother into the helplessness of old age and the helplessness of the son in the face of her decline. There ought to be wisdom available for such times, but in ‘The Wisdom of Age’ there is none. The son has come to mend a faulty fuse for his mother, itself a symbol of human circuits cut, malfunction, the ravages of age:
Now, together we must face the
faulty future – me standing there with
my yellow screwdriver and
my poultice of fuse-wire,
her with her poor hair
and her need which
clings to us both until we kneel
wishing that wisdom would help
but knowing it can’t.
The ageless hipster and chronicler of his nation’s foibles is suddenly middle-aged, and vulnerable. These are moving poems that take Peter Finch into new territory. He should follow where they are going.
John Barnie
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
|
