Iain Sinclair: Roads Without End

IAIN SINCLAIR: ROADS WITHOUT END From his first days in London, Iain Sinclair was obsessed with two paintings confronted in a Francis Bacon retrospective at the old Tate Gallery. The reworking of a lost masterwork, Van Gogh's 'Painter on the Road to Tarascon', depicting a burdened pedestrian melting into his own shadow. And a spectral life-mask of a decapitated William Blake. Everything that followed seemed to relate to one or other of these prophetic images. The mortal contract involved constant movement, one expedition bleeding into the next, until John Clare's definitive account of his escape from an Epping Forest asylum/refuge, carried us out of the known into the transcendent. The painter Renchi Bicknell, a collaborator in much of this mischief, will be on hand to revise and extend the conversation. ABOUT IAIN SINCLAIR Visionary, poet, novelist, essayist, film-maker, anthologist, curator, psychogeographer, Iain Sinclair is one of our most admired and versatile writers and makers, and Pembroke Poetry is delighted to welcome him back to Cambridge. He is the celebrated author ofDownriver (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 EmpireandGhost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances and Conductors of Chaos. Though we can expect him to range far and wide in the conversation he promises this evening, the book that is likely to be of particular relevance is his marvellous Edge of the Orison: in the traces of John Clare's 'Journey out of Essex' (2005) 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.