I remember the people surrounding me, the circumstances that boosted me to do this, so it was quite an experience and an extremely lengthy experience, pulling together ghost pamphlets, forgotten pamphlets, books and booklets that hadn’t been opened for decades and decades, material that hadn’t even made it into the Selected Poems of mine from the mid 1980s.īut Andrew Taylor the editor of the Collected Poems was keen on reviving things that were even outside that frame – things which had appeared in small magazines that I had forgotten about and where the poems hadn’t survived, as I hadn’t kept them or sold the poem to the National Library of Wales and it had left my environment. The whole process was like getting into a time machine and travelling back to earlier decades, earlier eras of your life and reading things you haven’t looked at for, come on, for fifty years in some cases thinking did I really think that? So I discovered how weak I often was, how inconsistent I was in the early part of my career. Peter Finch: It’s an eye opener when you look back over your career and do so in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise – being selective because even though these are called Collected Poems you kick out things that really aren’t going to make it.Īnd how whole books produce just one poem, one poem that is going to survive and it’s your choice if it’s going to do so. I had a cup of tea with one of the many Peters before we went on stage at this year’s Hay Festival where I suggested that the publication of the Collected Poems was a chance to take stock, to consider his work over five decades and see the evolution of himself as a poet:… His fellow poet Ian Macmillan, writing in the introduction to this landmark publication suggests that one way of explaining the enormous productivity which has produced, in turn, so many pulsating machines is that there is, in fact, more than one Peter Finch, indeed many of them working simultaneously. The great, restless, wildly experimental poet Peter Finch has just published his Collected Poems, two substantial tomes weighing in at a thousand pages, both full of the fizz and energy that so typifies his humorous, splendid and impossibly inventive work.Ī Finch poem has been described as ‘always a living object, a made thing, a pulsating machine made of words.’ By then, the curtain had long fallen on the fragile beauty that had been Vivien Leigh.Peter Finch Collected Poems vols 1 & 2, published by Seren Books. He went on to A Town Called Alice and, ultimately, his own Oscar, posthumously, in 1977, a category first. The lovers ran off to the south of France, held hands at Stratford and drove poor Larry to his wit's end. The shoot was cancelled and Leigh replaced with Elizabeth Taylor. He abdicated his wife to his protégé and returned home, "in a soft coat of numbness". Olivier was summoned, "anxious to see the state of the union". She slipped into paranoia, began to hallucinate and trailed after Finch, calling him Larry. The script called for Leigh to escape a giant anaconda and a herd of stampeding elephants. Both were drinking heavily and they spent the nights together on a hillside under the stars. There had been earlier rumours of an affair but things came to a head during the filming. To get her out of sight, she was offered the lead in Elephant Walk, to be shot in Ceylon. By the time she won an Oscar for Streetcar, she was beyond even Hollywood's pale. She slept with everyone and anyone, suffered delusions and started to go completely starkers. Soon after, while playing Blanche duBois, her manic-depression became a full-blown pathology. On their return from Australia, Vivien announced that she now loved her husband "sort of, well, like a brother." By then, all was not well with the royal marriage. Three months later, Finch arrived in London and Olivier put him on contract. If ever he was in England, he should get in touch. ![]() A veteran of outback tent shows, a Dad and Dave film, army service in the Middle East and a role in Rats of Tobruk, he wowed the factory workers and sandwich-munching secretaries. With his expressive cheekbones, resonant voice and luxuriant wavy hair, Finch was Australia's most promising actor. Married since 1940, the golden couple were touring Australia to stiffen the post-war cultural sinews of the Commonwealth and raise money for the cash-strapped Old Vic theatre company. He had been knighted for conspicuous enunciation in tights and she had won an Academy Award for her Scarlett O'Hara. Olivier and Leigh were the king and queen of the British theatre. One lunchtime in August 1948, Peter Finch was doing Molière on the shop floor at O'Brien's glass factory in Sydney when Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh turned up.
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