Zen Cymru by Peter Finch

10 May 2010

Zen Cymru
by Peter Finch
Seren Press; Paperback;
72 pages; Price £7.99;

ISBN:978-1-85411-500-3

Rory Waterman

Cardiff does not have a Poet Laureate, but if it did Peter Finch would surely be a shoo-in. Few poets enjoy Finch’s popularity or ooze such a sense of place, and this has been reflected in countless commissioned poems for the city, several of which make their way into Zen Cymru. He is also a brash, innovative, prolific and furiously up-to-date performer of his work, and the back cover of this collection states that ‘his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic impact of pieces conceived for the stage’. But when found on a book cover this sort of comment begs the question: do they maintain their dramatic impact on the page?

At the bottom of one discursive poem, Finch refers to what he has written as ‘a gob / of verse’. This suggests impulsiveness more than introspection, recklessness rather than subtlety. And this is, for the most part, apposite. More often than not, Zen Cymru disappoints in the way the work of performance poets is wont to disappoint when presented in book form. So, for example, ‘The Bosoms You Have Brought from Outside’ begins:

We have taken out the contents of the

mini bar and are considering replacing it

with replicas from the supermarket

This is prose cut into verse; and it is all too immediate, devoid of nuance. And so the poem rolls on down the page until the speaker beds his woman, or she beds him, in their hotel room: ‘I am older now yet they [the eponymous bosoms] are still exciting. / Unfortunately, I am unable to move’. Similarly, ‘Foul Drainage’ might be a hoot in a hall, but it reads like a stand-up comedian’s notes for a would-be sketch abandoned at the draft stage:

[...] radio

with P16 strapped to outer-casing

using insulation tape eight hundred

plus tax decide to shit

in the woods

There are moderate successes in a similar vein, such as ‘N Wst Brdg’, a text message take-off of Wordsworth: ‘Deer GD! vry hses seem slp | | / + all tht BIG HRT lyng still!’. Funny, in its small way, as is another poem following the footsteps of Wordsworth in which we encounter an ‘unreadable notice shot to buggery’. This is modern Britain, right enough, but apart from the typically colourful use of the vernacular and a sort of cheeky Shane Meadows-style irreverence, it isn’t all that interesting. And when at the end of the poem the speaker stops to ‘take a leak in a mess / of bramble’ a reader might be inclined to sigh with him.

Some of the work in Zen Cymru tests the boundaries of what constitutes a poem – a courageous thing to attempt. So ‘Index to the Grand Holiday Club Timeshare Sellers Handbook’ is (yes) an index with wry entries. ‘Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen at Speed’ is ‘a translation from the Welsh original made by running past the original text much in the way that motorway drivers pass roadsigns’: ‘light and little proud ah / Lleucu heart broken / Merioneth’. ‘The Ballast Bank’ comprises a mainly alphabetical list of about one hundred and fifty words. A note claims that ‘The poem delineates the races, language groupings, trades and ideas which flowed in and out of the burgeoning industrial town [of Cardiff] as it exponentially developed’:

Norman

Northwalian

Orthodox

Norwegian

Potato

Raiders (Viking)

Russkii

Rhondda

The things Finch does well, he does very well. He has a keen ear for the strange and funny things people say, dropping punctuation to get the tone just right. In ‘Looking for the Southern Cross’ the guard outside a museum ‘said cross / boy you want Jesus. Maybe I did’. This poet also has a habit of writing in sentence fragments or little ungrammatical salvos, or of using self-consciously long sentences in his choppy verse. So, for example, in a typically zany poem called ‘The Trial of Phil Spector’:

The hair lacquer past where multiple percussionists drive

like motorbikes round a circular track is the place where it all

begins. Dance dance three-minute teenage angst.

The best poems in Zen Cymru are on weightier subjects, and there aren’t enough of them. ‘Chelsea Hotel’, about the famous hotel in New York, turns quickly to an analysis of that city’s – and America’s – post-9/11 culture of ‘fear’, and of jingoism: looking at the hotel from the street, he observes that ‘Little has changed other than America itself’. The speaker is stopped three times by ‘the cops’, who are hunting for ‘semtex’ and ‘dynamite’, and on the Fourth of July,

In the twilit mass, steaming along Roosevelt

the crowd swear endless allegiance,

sing the star-spangled, shout for victory,

sway in the dusk, sweating and certain.

This is readable, perhaps accurate, and has a subtle, sinister edge to it lacking in so many other poems here.

Throughout the book Finch often cuts an empathetic figure, and a few of these poems can move us for their humanity and clear-sightedness even if the poetry is not always what it might be. And every now and then, he just gets it right:

We walk in the garden where the plants no

longer have names and the birds are blurs.

You are holding onto me with that clutch of

yours that crushes bones. Who are we,

mother and son in a rain which keeps getting colder?

The mouth won’t answer, it doesn’t know,

but the body, that remembers.

But too often the poems in Zen Cymru attempt to be amusing, stylistically innovative or brash, and fall short – at least on the page.

Rory Waterman has written for the TLS, Dark Horse, Agenda, PN Review and various other publications. Carcanet will publish a selection of his poems in an anthology next year. He co-edits New Walk Magazine for poetry and the arts: www.tinyurl.com/newwalkmag