In Edge of the Orison the visionary Iain Sinclair
walks in the steps of poet John Clare. In 1841 the poet
John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked
eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was
searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three
years dead ...In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate
Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand
his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his
London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his
wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the
artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a
host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic -
Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into
madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.
''Brilliant ...amusing, alarming and poignant. An elegy
for an already lost English landscape. Magnificent and
urgent''. (Robert Macfarlane, Times Literary
Supplement). ''A sensitive,beautifully rendered portrait
...a feast, a riddle, a slowly unravelling conundrum
...a love-letter to British Romanticism''.
(Independent).''Sinclair walks every inch of his
wonderful novels and psychogeographies, pacing out huge
word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an
empty plain''. (J. G. Ballard, Observer). Iain Sinclair
is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's
Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for
the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel
Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining
on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire, and Ghost
Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of
Disappearances. |
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