Welsh Poems

Peter Finch, The Welsh Poems. Exeter: Shearsman, 2006. 146pp. $16 The Welsh Poems doesn't make much new. But that's not Peter Finch's project. Across the book, Finch figures the poem as a site of cognitive waste, a word-fill. The collection includes extended permutations, poems gleaned from websites, found-language chunks, and stream-of-consciousness blocks-all pointing away from notions of originality and toward ideas of infinite transformation. Regrettably, however, Finch's ideas are often more compelling than their realization. One long poem, "Easy X-Rays" includes four columns of words in reduced font spread across four and a half pages. It ends in eighteen repetitions of the word "waste" (which pick up three earlier iterations and a single "waist"). The poem draws a connection between language and discarded excess; it works best as a visual exemplification of the mind's detritus. Reading it, you have to wade through an awful lot of verbal rubbish. Those familiar with experimental poetry will quickly recognize the strategies required to read Finch's work. (The best experimental poetry, on the other hand, challenges the conventions that allow for its categorization.) Uninitiated readers may simply refuse to read the refuse, as the book is chock-full of fluff like the following from the poem "Tea Room": They took the road back in a car that leaked marking its territory as it went like a cat. Cat. Cart. Critch. Kringle Cat. Coot. Cooloop Cat. Cancan Teenadan Can Deeta Canrowtoo Canreeta Canrowtoo Cancreela Crimb Crime Crark Cat. Cob had two one huge with a lazy tongue one black and white with fragile bones so deep down in the fur you knew it had to be old. Such stream-of-consciousness heaps leave readers without a sense of destination or satisfying necessity. The "huh" or "huh?" that follows may be the most illuminating criticism available. To balance this engagement with excess, Finch also consistently alludes to spiritual encounters with blankness: "I favour the cessation of particle movement, gaps between, cold." This, of course, recalls some eastern spiritual traditions, which clearly inform Finch's work. He overtly points to such an influence in the poem "Past Interests," listing, along with many other interests, "The martial arts aikido, tai chi chuan and tae kwondo" and "Tibetan Buddhism." What Gary Snyder describes, Peter Finch enacts-a transitory dwelling in "That place where the outgoing breath ends and the incoming has not yet begun. …