Book description
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.
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 lives in Hackney, East London.
