Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets

Iain Sinclair's classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic 'heat' as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book's many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the 'psychogeographical' tone for much of Sinclair's mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore's From Hell.

Lud Heat is ostensibly a narrative of a period of employment in the Parks Department of an East London borough; this temporal location, however, receives less stress than the spatial one with which it intersects: that of the pattern imposed on the townscape by Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches, potent presences in the poet's working environment, around which accretes a second temporal dimension, historical and mythological ... When Sinclair writes of the modern city that 'natural & ancient rhythms are perverted in Golgonooza's architechture' it is as part of a firmly patterned written structure that we have first of all to take his words. Only thus, sustained by powerful written ligatures, can the arrangement of the poet's information command any credence as argument. - Andrew Crozier