Letter from Wales

Peter Finch is, by some distance, the best known and most widely appreciated poet in Wales. Of his own beginnings in poetry, he tells us that in 1963, aged sixteen, he bought Ginsburg’s Howl from an SPCK bookshop in his hometown, Cardiff. By 1965 he had his own poems published in Viewpoint and Poet’s Platform, and in 1966 he launched his own small magazine Second Aeon – which grew exponentially before finally winding up in 1974. Although I do not now have a clear recollection of the occasion, I am fairly confident that we first met in the summer of 1975 on the well-kept lawn of Meic Stephens’s back garden in Whitchurch, Cardiff. Certainly, that was the year he was appointed manager of Oriel, the Welsh Arts Council’s brand-new bookshop, on the first floor of ‘a converted Victorian house in a side-street off Cardiff’s main shopping thoroughfare’ – I quote from Peter’s own account of the shop’s origins in PNR 109. Meic, then WAC Literature Director, had been active in promoting the scheme, and the choice of manager (although his previous work experience had been in local government) proved inspirational: ‘We stocked everything there was in the Welsh language, the whole range of Welsh writing in English… shelves of art books and a whole wall of poetry, small press items, little magazines, writers’ directories… and manuals on how to write.’ He goes on to say how on the shelves of Oriel customers would find the largest stock of English language poetry outside London. As time passed, in new premises, it ...