Emporium

Description

Emporium, Ian Pindar's first collection, is stocked with curiosities, jokes and horrors. Step through the door and discover Big Bumperton on his bicycle, Mrs Beltinska in her bath, Monsieur P. on holiday, a transfixed girl in blue jeans, a wasp, two lascivious figs and a god who wanders shopping arcades 'enhaloed in black flames of longing and dread'. A chain letter travels across centuries of poetry, from Langland to Maxine Chernoff; deep in a snowy forest, seen only by wolves, a mysterious machine is resonating - Pindar maps a surreal hinterland where the dark humour of absurdity lies in wait.

Ian Pindar was born in London in 1970. He is the author of Joyce (Haus, 2004), a biography of James Joyce, and co-translated The Three Ecologies (Continuum, 2000) by the radical French theorist Felix Guattari. He was an editor at J. M. Dent, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and the Harvill Press, where he edited Haruki Murakami, Anna Politkovskaya and W. G. Sebald. He is now a freelance writer and editor, and regularly contributes to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. He won second prize in the 2009 National Poetry Competition and is the recipient of an award from the Arthur Welton Foundation. He lives in Oxfordshire.

It was about time for somebody to be channelling Eliot, maybe Stevens, Laforgue, and the Metaphysicals to such clashing effect: 'bright as a seedsman's packet', with unexpected timbres and sonorities sabotaged by glockenspiel accents. Pindar is just right for the job. JOHN ASHBERY In this sparkling debut collection Ian Pindar brilliantly fulfils Verlaine's injunction to the poet to take eloquence and wring its neck. Emporium offers the reader a beguiling and compendious range of styles and voices, and signals the arrival of a fascinating and original poet. MARK FORD