Ian Pindar - Emporium

Ian Pindar, Emporium ( Carcanet)


Well, no, not really. My usually trustworthy eye for a good new poetry book might have left me down for once. It’s hardly for me to say that any book written at this level of erudition isn’t any good but I will have to accept that I wasn’t a part of its target audience even though I thought Ian’s prize-winning poem last year and his exemplary short biography of Joyce both suggested that his debut in ‘full-length’ poetry would be something I ought be buying.
I’m not ashamed to say if and when something is beyond me but if it seems to be orbiting beyond one’s remit, one shouldn’t be able to get the feeling that there are bits of it one simply doesn’t like and I’m afraid here I get a sense that when it isn’t trying too hard, then it is simply not my sort of thing. I hope it wins every prize that it qualifies for but unless I suddenly see the point, it isn’t going to make my shortlist.
There is one poem that demands attention- Chain Letter, a wonderful 'tour de force' that seems to take us through English language poetry from Langland to very recently (and thanks to the notes for showing some of us who didn’t know all the lines) in a wonderful, let’s say- for the sake of it- phantasmagoria of purloined fragments. Heaven only knows how well-read and clever you have to be to do that. It is a sensational thing but, somehow, disappointingly brilliant.
Disappointing when you have only just read The King’s Evil, an apparently not-ironic anti-Royalist poem that doesn’t seem to have realized that the monarchy might reign but doesn’t rule, that might appear to think that Prince Andrew is in charge and also seems to want to celebrate the democracy that in recent decades has given us Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the Coalition government successively shoring up the rich against the threat of the ever poor and taking us to war on behalf of another big fat country. Well, if that’s what Thomas Paine meant, it’s a shame he’s not here to defend himself. This poem can’t be as stupid as it seems to me because Ian Pindar is clearly several times cleverer and better read than me and so it must just be me missing the point - that has happened before- but I’m not sure I’d have written anything quite as gauche in the fourth form never mind 35 years later. I’m not particularly royalist but a better argument than this needs to be made if I’m going to be swayed from some admiration for the Queen and, say, Pippa Middleton. A colleague of mine went to a recent garden party at Buckingham Palace and met the Queen. My colleague is wheelchair-bound. When she met the Queen, and you always want to know what she said, Her Majesty said ‘I bet you can go quite fast in that.’ Brilliant.
We are told we have democracy already but unfortunately it’s run by gangsters, like the world always has been. What our country has that others seem to covet is a bit of class. I’m not saying we have. We invented Wayne Rooney and Jeremy Clarkson. All I’m saying is ‘be careful what you wish for’.
Armageddon is a nicely disturbed poem. Mrs Beltinska in the Bath is the prize winner I liked a lot. Birds, on a theme of totalitarianism, is a well-done piece. I could almost have liked this book as much as I thought was going to. Ian Pindar is beyond doubt a writer of immense talent and reading but I’m not going to say ‘depth’ because I suspect the politics and modernism on show here might be a bit shallow.
I could have spent seven quid on Amazon on something I liked better but it’s too late now.