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 & 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 & 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 & magus Alan Moore
- as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary & romantic
- Sinclair`s quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity & the nature of the poet`s muse. ” Brilliant.. .amusing, alarming & poignant. An elegy for an already lost English landscape. Magnificent & 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 & 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 & 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, & Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.