Reviews

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