SINCLAIR’S SECRET SWAN

On Iain Sinclair’s Agents of Oblivion (Swan River Press, 2023)

Iain Sinclair’s secret store can be found at source
In his stories; a semi-selective trove; buried treasure
Subject to chocolate-rich autopsies, peeled slow.

For as you prise past the taste of the slabs
Of the sweet meat he always serves, you see
Such succulence sat: prose dripped stanzas,

Sigils and signs, vision flows, as he stops to detail
These oblivion set secret agents; Algernon Blackwood,
JG Ballard, Arthur Machen, and HP Lovecraft

In his unique, sinewed style. For no-one can write
Like Iain Sinclair on this planet, and indeed,
While reading one detects an empirically alien view

And wry smile as he pinpoints light-shafts
Directed at the particular ghosts who surround him,
As these chosen heroes perform divine missions,

Cavorting for him and complicit in every dream dare
As diary, as if hallucination itself were work task.
Having set off for Peru to chase his Grandad’s expeditions,

Sinclair now swims back to London, snorkelling down
Paper rivers, where the among the supporting cast
Playing for him are Graham Greene, Moorcock, Driffield,

And even old Bill Blake through death’s mask. The return trip
Through these tales has a watery feel which seems fitting.
Dublin’s Swan River Press’s slim but strong hardback is a gift

To the eye and the hand, as it holds the delights
Of some of Sinclair’s founding forces, from his reverence
Of Roeg and Cammell’s Performance, to his own city-set

Celebrations for a time and a place where each writer
Could with the flick of the wrist create lands
Beyond all common ken, be that in Kensal Green,

Or some other stone palace; locations guarded now
By these agents whom Sinclair revives with his pen.
Blackwood begins, Sinclair follows the lure of his creation

John Silence to rip through star-fabric as he roams around
Shooters Hill, ‘unearthing’ Steve Moore, mentor and magus
To Alan, who if Blake had started in comics,

Would have had him easily equalled, if not bested still.
Sinclair is now in league and business with ghosts.
His bookseller past has been traded for love of the essence

And not just the substance therein. He is fixing his rhythm
Around the pulse and stamp of strange angels,
Such as Steve’s Artemis-Selene, his moon goddess,

Who appeared to both Moores on a sofa, straddling
Steve’s lap, child-like, naked and in line with such visions,
Clad from tip to toe in blue skin. When read again,

Sinclair’s lost London books are intrepid trawls
Through what’s living, and of what lingers, as all his reports
From Rodinsky’s room on Brick Lane, to John Clare’s Orison

And on, are now undercored by these ectoplasmic
Transfusions of people and place, duly written over
As each page sparks stark word-flame.

All of his phrases astound. Pick any page and you’ll
See them. Sinclair’s words burst like flowers,
Or have the exact same sting as a thorn,

With images stacked up like tomes in a mysterious
Westway book cellar, acting as cinema of invention,
Where Sinclair’s poetic prose is projecting on and into

The corners where both madness and myth can be born.
Books are births for Sinclair, and he has had many children.
As mid-wife and parent his potency is profound.

He can consider a point and conjure up a black-hole density
Volume. He can traipse through Beckettian bogs,
As well as Bosche-like forests, and compose

Sparked Sonatas from even the M25’s common ground.
And so Machen, his mystical antecedent breaks through
In this book’s second story. House of Flies talks of boxes,

Pandora primed by Nick Lane, unleashing Crowley,
Jimmy Page, Stewart Lee (acknowledged Laureate
of the tin foil tray and Premier Inn), among others,

Including Stoke Newington’s Simon Toate, poet
Of the podcast, who becomes the day’s Virgil,
Leading Lee and Iain, and by inference Arthur,

From Abney Park back to Hackney in this Dante-esque
Ghost-fed game. It would seem that the Balls Pond
Road subsumes hope but at the very least grants adventure.

Sinclair as both guide and apostle is a Prospero-in-transit
Here, content to summon up sprites as he reviews
The magical island in motion upon which his work has settled.

The people he meets are wave-motion, but Sinclair is the sea.
This seems clear. ‘The scent of violets drowned in milk bottles’
Surrounds, another one of his phrases. Each tale transfigures.

At a gender fluid time, streets are Bi, changing both aspect
And shape as Sinclair treks along them. After over fifty years
Writing, he walks every word and line as thoughts fly.

For make no mistake, his books are birds.
They soar strangely, as if each carrying craft were creating
The skies and horizons to cross. Sinclair can both follow

And fly, as once more here, he is Norton. As seen
In Alan Moore and Kevin O Neill’s The Black Dossier volume,
The still on the throne London Magus, ruling by report

On time’s textures, while checking that each spell
Has it’s order as he pulls both forest and flare from kerb moss.
In London Spirit, Ballard returns, as Chief Cartographer

Charting chaos. Sinclair and Chris Petit, his comrade
In motorised charm fall instep, with all dead Jim knew
And with all he predicted; ‘beneath the elfin gardens

of Tolkein Colonists,’ and under John Latham’s
Book towers, Sinclair’s regal visit to his past terrain
Can’t forget the pure poetics of place,

Be they in his own writing room, or the ghosted
Restaurant table, where Roeg and Ballard try to blend in,
And where on reflection it is as if Archimedes and Odin

Had stopped for sweet and sour pork, and escape.
It occurs as one reads that Angels of Oblivion is a memoir
Of things thought, done and essayed across this

And no doubt other worlds. Popular poets of the time
And of what is possible for the crowd, fall in line
With ordinary expectation. These are the performance poets

And slammers and the resistors to a book’s special sheets.
But Sinclair and co, his siblings in writing and film,
Breach such spaces to evoke centuries, even aeons

In under two hundred pages, on streets. And with every
Step and heartbeat an entire civilisation is captured,
Beyond how we are living now. And for me, this completes

And extends Iain Sinclair’s special mission. Surpassing
Shatner and akin to Kirk, his log entries have been sent
To the stars, a chased fleece. For these stories

Become odysseys, as in the last Lovecraft infused tale,
At the Mountains of Madness. In taking Howard Phillips’
Title, Sinclair spots the point at which we all slip
Past the illusion of freedom, and recognise on re-entry
That cities are cages bound by the sigils and signs
Mentioned first. It took the eventual use

Of his freedom pass to expose that fact for us.
And so, Iain in his anec-dotage can fully unfurl flag
And curse. The writers and artists he admires,

And those with whom he walks are true poets,
Especially those unbound by verses, for poetry is prophecy.
And Sinclair and Catling and co., Kotting, Moore, Machen,

Ballard are the poets and prophets who give reason
And rhyme tenancy. They are travelling well known roads
To reveal the unknown underneath them. Oblivion’s ink

Is Time’s Tippex. We can thank the Monkee Michael
Nesmith’s Mum for all that. And yet here in this book,
A handsome, limited and thereby elusive edition,

We have a grail for the gaining; housed perhaps
In a tower hidden behind London flats. For in holding
This time-whipped tome, the book becomes

It’s own Babel, containing a High-Rise of heroes
Awaiting within, breathlessly. Dave McKean’s drawings invite,
As seen by the front cover’s branch entranched ladder,

Another of Sinclair’s bookish brothers, McKean in pen
And Ink transmutes form. As does this book, and the work
Of those featured in it; from angels and agents

To Alan, oblivion is enchanting. As with Harold Budd’s
Pavilion of Dreams, strange air shapes us. We feel
And peel for it. And in doing just that, stars are worn.

David Erdos 22/5/23