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Lud Heat & Suicide Bridge
Lud Heat, a fusion of prose and verse, is an exploration of a contemporary city and the historical and mythical patterns that it hides. This edition also includes Sinclair's series of texts on the mythology of place called Suicide Bridge.
304 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1995
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About the author
Iain Sinclair
120 books341 followersIain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 12, 2016
the word devours the beast/as the fig devoured the donkey
Equally dense and transportive, Sinclair is always a poet, melding and fusing, even while penning his psycho-geography or his harrowing novels. This pair of works from the mid-70s is not for the faint of heart, nor is it a recommended point of entry into the world of Sinclair. The first section balances the architect Hawksmoor and the film artist Brahkage. The second plumbs the occult to find Howard Hughes gestating at the core of our collective unconscious. Be wary.
Equally dense and transportive, Sinclair is always a poet, melding and fusing, even while penning his psycho-geography or his harrowing novels. This pair of works from the mid-70s is not for the faint of heart, nor is it a recommended point of entry into the world of Sinclair. The first section balances the architect Hawksmoor and the film artist Brahkage. The second plumbs the occult to find Howard Hughes gestating at the core of our collective unconscious. Be wary.
July 8, 2022
I really enjoy Sinclair for his moments of clarity. These works, in particular have some brilliantly evocative passages with repeated touchstones - Hawksmoor, Brakhage films - but then it flips into full-on psychogeographical glossolalia.
Reading these works is like reading something in another language when you only have a Berlitz phrase book. It's designed for lifelong Londoners. I know enough to see the big picture, but like the guitarist duelling in Deliverance, I'm lost.
Reading these works is like reading something in another language when you only have a Berlitz phrase book. It's designed for lifelong Londoners. I know enough to see the big picture, but like the guitarist duelling in Deliverance, I'm lost.
March 17, 2024
the stuff about the churches and that is very cool, as is some of the poetry. Didn’t read it all as I am busy
November 10, 2013
Borderline pretentious which is only slightly forgivable considering the intent of the two selections: a disturbing traipsing through pseudo-occultic London and a psychogeography of characters peopling William Blake. When Sinclair sticks to his guns and charts terrains of darkness via verse, he's pretty stellar, it's when he devolves into prose gibberish that he loses a lot of his momentum and grace. I've never read any of his novels, so I have nothing to compare this too, though if the dense, mountebank fluoride taste left in my mouth after slogging through parts of this dual work is any indication, I can't imagine I'd like them.
March 25, 2016
hypnotic poetry blending, bending, swirling, stealing and revealing the banal, arcane, folk, physical, mafioso, mythical, egyptian, british, occult, academic, immediate, ancient, real, imagined, horror, beauty, vibration, philosophy, architecture, pain, place, brutality and history lost and found in London, England, planet Earth... you'll probably want to keep wikipedia open while you read it.
December 3, 2011
- The older you get the more time collapses.
- He is immune to the touch of the wind that destroyed him, though if he comes physically into contact with even the shadow of a dog he is gone.
- He is immune to the touch of the wind that destroyed him, though if he comes physically into contact with even the shadow of a dog he is gone.
August 2, 2012
Some of the most exciting prose/verse poetry I have read in a while.
October 11, 2018
This book got me out of my reading slump and even though it took me a while to get interested in it, once I was I couldn't stop reading.
June 2, 2014
Two short, odd books by Iain Sinclair, combined together in one volume. They are both about vaguely occult weird stuff in London, with Lud Heat focussing in particular on the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor and drawing on the author's experiences tending the grounds of St. Anne's Limehouse (where his colleagues probably thought him a right weirdo). I found the books enjoyable, but I would have liked more bonkers occult stuff about the alignment of buildings and suchlike to make geometric patterns.
June 22, 2012
After passing the fantastic sections centering on Hawskmoor's churches and through to Stan Brakhage's autopsy footage, I've found myself lost in a dense psychogeography of truly British verse with no moorings onto which I can latch. I think I am too lazy or too American or both to trudge any further.
September 11, 2010
Two really great poems about East London.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews