A sill of worn green-painted wood,
A window open before dawn:
Barefoot in the mild air I stood
To watch above the starred horizon

A swallowtail of dusty gold
Stream upward from the comet's eye,
While in an unfamiliar, tumbled
Bed in the room behind, you lay

Until I called you and you came
And by the window took my hand.
What powers calibrate the dark
reflector of the dreaming mind?

from '1985: Dreaming the Comet'

'Transparently accomplished,' as John Kerrigan has written: 'his work displays the kind of internal "itinerary" which (in Mandelstam's language) is the mark of achieved poetry'.

This book selects the best work from thirty years of that itinerary, a journey through worlds exotic, domestic, surreal and psychic, explored with visual sharpness and linguistic acuity. This is above all a poetry of colour and celebration, of strangeness blossoming inside familiarity, nurtured with a meticulous patterning of language and form.

Eavan Boland has called Lindop's 'a lyric voice that moves language in and out of metaphor with skill and grace, draws you in, reminds you of an ordered and structured world the voice of a happy spirit with, maybe, a measure of regret and an interesting intimation of waste.'