In his youth, Peter Finch wove his way through a series of exploits and adventures. Travels took him to Canada, where a fateful encounter in the Rocky Mountains opened up new horizons. In midlife he and his wife Gundi made the shift to country living, ushering in a new phase in their life, as they set down roots in the hills and settled into a deliberately simplified lifestyle.

Peter relates how he and Gundi immersed themselves in ways guided by nature. As she created and sold glass sculptures, he sunk his hands and tools into pure glacial-till soils, sowing, planting, and growing culinary and medicinal herbs, heirloom vegetables and salad greens to take to farmers markets and restaurants in and around Toronto. Invigorated by the pleasures and health benefits of growing, selling, and eating fresh organic food, Peter reveals how he became a passionate advocate of traditional, small-scale, chemical-free farming.

"High Up in the Rolling Hills" shares the personal journey of an independent couple as they explore the vital role of nature, creativity, and healthy food in life.

The Real Series moves to west Wales with a new volume focused on Tenby and its hinterland. Poet, past resident and frequent visitor Tony Curtis roams south Pembrokeshire, from the coastal resorts of Tenby and Saundersfoot, west to the surfers of Stackpole and Barafundle and north to the Landsker, the cultural boundary between English speaking south Pembs and the Welsh speaking north. In keeping with the series Curtis view his area through the eyes of a local and as a visitor, digging into his own Pembrokeshire backstory - and deeper into is history but also observing keenly the Pembrokeshire of the new century.

In his first full collection for six years, Peter Finch, premier exponent of modernism, works once more at the brink of culture. Employing a range of styles, techni ques and forms, he explores what late 20th century life is l ike. '

Zen Cymru is the new collection of poems by that master of modern angst, Peter Finch. Not one for quiet meditations, this voice is: loud, bewildered, satirical, furious, sad, fearful and funny. This is a Wales that missed its revolution in 'I Chew Gum and Think of Rifles'. This is a Wales beset by: rain, the ghosts of hard-drinking poets, of holy wells guarded by heifers, of sports crowds, Ikea, sheep, enormous storm cloudsA", and the 'Entry of Christ Into Cardiff, 2005'. A health scare merits a mini-epic in 'The Clinic'. Elvis is seen in Asda, Merthyr. Travel brings little respite, only access to foreign anxieties and temptations. We visit 'The Miro Mini-bar' in Barcelona, look for Bella Bartok in Hungary, take a road trip to Ireland, find more rain and that The land gives out in an emerald flail.A"America offers defunct bluesmen, a murderous Phil Spector, and over-zealous security personal near the Chelsea Hotel, NYC. Finch is a well-known performance poet and his poems have the immediacy and the dramatic impact of pieces conceived for the stage. Formal innovation is allied with themes that are resonant and deeply humane. Zen Cymru will win yet more fans to the Finch cult.

In The Roots of Rock, from Cardiff to Mississippi and Back Peter Finch reflects on how popular music has shaped both his life and the culture in which he lives, from first hearing American music on the radio in his Cardiff home in the 1950s to the compendious and downloadable riches of digital files. Finch has always gone to gigs and now he travels to the bars of Ireland, the clubs of New York, the plains of Tennessee, the flatlands of Mississippi and the mountains of North Carolina to get a feel for the culture from which his favourite music originates. The resulting book mixes musical autobiography with an exploration of physical places in western Europe and the US. It is a demonstration of the power of music to create a world for the listener that is simultaneously of and beyond the place in which it is heard. Finch marks his journey with reminiscences of music in Britain from skiffle and early Cliff Richard pop to Bill Cotton and his Band to Champion Jack Dupree playing the local British Legion. There are asides on forming your own (destined to fail) band, the rise of folk music, the arrival of the blues and the burgeoning Welsh language scene. In the US come visits to Dollywood, Graceland, Muscle Shoals, Grand Ole Opry and Stax, plus the Appalachian mountains and the crossroads on Highway 49 where Robert Johnson made his devilish pact. The cast of musicians includes Muddy Waters, Taylor Swift, Bessie Smith, Tommy Steele, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Chris Tweed and singing cowboys. They are joined by music historians like Cecil Sharp, Maud Kapeles and Harrison Mayes who helped formalise and save traditions, by jugbands, gospel choirs and Anne Nichols, the tragic Knoxville Girl. Each chapter is accompanied by a multi-track play list to help the reader have the full flavour of what Finch's musical experiences and bring alive the many sharp witted stories and thoughtful cultural connections. The result is an entertaining, informative book from which the reader will learn much and hear more.

This sequel offers another unorthodox travel guide to Cardiff, Wales. Part history, part topographical writing, and part traditional guidebook, this work explores Cardiff's best off-the-beaten-path destinations such as Ninian Park, Howell's Girls School, Cae'r Castell, and Steep Holm.

In his youth, Peter Finch wove his way through a series of exploits and adventures. Travels took him to Canada, where a fateful encounter in the Rocky Mountains opened up new horizons. In midlife he and his wife Gundi made the shift to country living, ushering in a new phase in their life, as they set down roots in the hills and settled into a deliberately simplified lifestyle.

Peter relates how he and Gundi immersed themselves in ways guided by nature. As she created and sold glass sculptures, he sunk his hands and tools into pure glacial-till soils, sowing, planting, and growing culinary and medicinal herbs, heirloom vegetables and salad greens to take to farmers markets and restaurants in and around Toronto. Invigorated by the pleasures and health benefits of growing, selling, and eating fresh organic food, Peter reveals how he became a passionate advocate of traditional, small-scale, chemical-free farming.

"High Up in the Rolling Hills" shares the personal journey of an independent couple as they explore the vital role of nature, creativity, and healthy food in life.

Peter Finch has long been a significant figure in Welsh-poetry-in-English and a busy editor and publisher. The Welsh Poems, a title which pays homage to poet John James, is a survey of his more experimental work from the past two decades, including visual work, sound poems, and a number of playful texts that riff on language, grammar and typography. The Welsh language seeps into Finch's work at all levels, sometimes penetrating the poems to the core, and at other times held at arm's length.

Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh is a eclectic and exciting gathering of poem and prose-poem manifestos and unmanifestos that try to understand what poetry is and who or what it might be for. It is also about what the authors might want or demand from poetry, in either a general or personal way. Manifestos are often declamatory and incendiary, but I have tried to defuse polemic and overtly dictatorial rhetoric by juxtaposition, and by selecting work from a wide range of critical and poetic positions, not least that of satire and wit.I've previously - as any of my students will tell you - dismissed manifestos, but have more recently found them useful to react against, to incite comment and both critical and poetical reponse with. Rather than read them as a definitive and final statement, I have come to see them as an important part of poetics: a useful way to think about reasons for writing, about processes and techniques one might use to make poetry, and about existing or potential relationships with real or imaginary audiences. The book is designed to encourage and incite readers to engage with what all too often is regarded as a trivial and occasional art form. I believe, as do many of the other contributors, that poetry is far more than self-expression and heartfelt truth, it is where language is actually rooted and initiallly located; it is where thought itself comes into being. Language is wonderful and intoxicating stuff, an engaging and pliable medium with endless potential for reinvention and recreation. If the reader can find enthusiasm, passion, laughter and deep thought in this book - and then argue and engage with it - I shall be a happy editor. These manifestos and unmanifestos do not add up to a whole, but in their communcal incoherence and difference they challenge and delight.

In the Middle Ages the port of Cardiff stretched from Chepstow to Gower. Peter Finch, archetypal Cardiffian, sets out to explore his heritage, walking the Welsh side of the Severn Estuary and reclaiming his personal memories in addition to discovering the lives of others. And with a detour to Maismore, the highest tidal point of the estuary, he walks the English side too, taking in the differences with Wales, reviving past links and looking at his homeland from abroad. On his journey he sees the estuary as border, a highway for trade and ideas, an industrial zone, and a place where people spend their leisure. Rich in anecdote, evocative in description, Finch's book takes in villages and cities, power stations and fishermen, castles and caravans, leg-aching walks and deckchairs on the beach. The tragedy of Lynmouth, the competing delights of Porthcawl, Barry and Weston-super-Mare, the industrial sites of Usk and Port Talbot, the fate of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea docks, the ancient trackways of Swansea Bay and the Star Inn at Neath are just some of the many stories which punctuate Finch's epic walk along some of the most beautiful coastline in Britain.