The Artel Press welcomes writer Jamie Finfer, who will publish his first poetry collection with the Liverpool-based publisher later this year.
Finfer is currently an undergraduate at Durham University, yet his debut works reveal a magical synthesis of technique and imagination that belie this early point in his writing career and preface an exciting future.
These are poems that immediately engage the reader, using a rich and striking vocabulary to illuminate stories of travel, history and cross-cultures across the British Isles – and beyond.
Finfer skilfully evades the temptation of writing poems about the self, but rather uses his personal story as a springboard to imaginatively re-cast his many characters or even to project alternate histories.
As he describes:
“The imaginative asides featured in my poems exploit my love of obscure history, solo travel and fantastic reimaginings to create voices. My own voice is there, too, but I don’t let that get in the way”.
Originally from Tadcaster in Yorkshire, Finfer’s writing continues to capture something of the wild beauty of northern landscapes and the people who inhabit them.
Poems such as The Song of the Yorkshire Undertaker and The Dread Paralysis of Jugurtha fuse landscape, semiotics and linguistics in a heady mix that promises to be an outstanding first collection from one of the UK’s most interesting new poets.