Ian Pindar

'It was about time for somebody to be channeling 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

Ian Pindar is a freelance writer, poet and editor. His debut collection Emporium (Carcanet) was shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection and he was shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best Single Poem). He came second in the National Poetry Competition. His second poetry collection is Constellations (Carcanet). His poems have appeared in The Forward Book of Poetry, London Magazine, Magma, PN Review, Poetry Review, Stand and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of a biography of James Joyce (Haus) and the co-translator of Félix Guattari's The Three Ecologies (Continuum).

Praise for Constellations

'Pindar's 88 brilliant new "constellations" are as haunting as they are enigmatic'

Marjorie Perloff, author of 21st-Century Modernism: The 'New' Poetics

'As in the cinema of Luis Buñuel or Lars von Trier, Constellations takes the bourgeois domestic scene as a stage for the slithering intrusion of death and anxiety . . . Nodding to the post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s rejection of the transcendental, the sixtieth meditation’s bald statement that ‘Life moves on the Plane of Matter’ sets up this resolution, an ending which retrospectively lends sense to the intimations of mortality in the apparent blissfulness of the earlier poems. This is undoubtedly ambitious territory, but Pindar negotiates it without awkwardness or sententiousness, and the constant presence of linguistic puzzles and semantic traps sets readers to work in a manner which means they are never patronized: there’s a real generosity in the way this poetry trusts its audience’s intelligence. Pindar’s opening brace contains a great deal of promise.’

Joe Kennedy in the Times Literary Supplement

'The pleasure of Constellations lies in their lyrics' easy movement among images and observations, their development less linear than cumulative . . . In such denser passages, where the observations leap from one to another in a momentum compelling both for the intriguing train of thought and for the music of the lines, Pindar achieves "a difficult // furthering; intense, informal immediacy" in his distinctive approach to the lyric.'

Guardian

'What's particularly important about Constellations is the way Pindar has forged a style based on Modernist and non-British role-models that sets it bravely apart from the run-of-the-mill complacencies of so many volumes published today. In so doing, it reminds us both of the restrictive set of tacit conventions many poets are writing by, and of the vastly wider possibilities embodied in looking beyond these same conventions and towards areas of poetry far more ambitious, complex and powerful than anything written in the UK in the last 10 years (the usual source of influence for new poets)'

Oliver Dixon/Ictus

'Pindar is urbane, funny and profound. A brilliant first collection.'

Poetry London

'Some of the most hyped poetry in Britain today has been ruthlessly pruned of any phrase that might ignite the slightest grin. Ian Pindar's first collection, Emporium, is a welcome antidote. It's dark, witty and entertaining . . . as ingenious as anything I've read for a while, and few collections have been half as entertaining.'

Rob A Mackenzie, Magma