Edge Of The Orison
In The Traces Of John Clare's "Journey Out Of Essex"
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.
%%%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.
About the author
Date: 2013-08-06
Iain Sinclair has been a rare book dealer, parks gardener, and all-purposes labourer across East London. In the 1970s he ran Albion Village Press, publishing Brian Catling and Chris Torrance, as well as several volumes of his own poetry. More recently he has written a number of television films, including The Cardinal and the Corpse, made with Christopher Petit for Channel 4. His essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, Sight and Sound and Modern Painters.
Downriver won the 1992 Encore Award for the year's best second novel and also the James Tait Black Memorial Award.
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 and Dining on Stones. He is also the editor of the anthology London: City of Disappearances. He lives in Hackney, East London.
Visit Iain Sinclair's website here.
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