Red Eye

Poetry. A lost foolscap typescript until its recent unearthing, the long poem RED EYE was written in 1973 for publication by Sinclair’s Albion Village Press the following year. Set aside to accommodate other books from the press, and pushed aside by darker forces, RED EYE is now revealed to be pivotal between Sinclair’s early, locally based texts and the larger, more mythic structures of Lud Heat. Comprised of stylistically and thematically different sections, in its documentation of daily domestic life RED EYE functions in parallel to Sinclair’s diary filming of late-1960s Hackney life, whilst its literal and poetical topographic journeys outward mirror the experimentation of the early film Maggot Street. The text of RED EYE receives its emotional equivalent in 16 full colour stills from these films, not to illustrate but to present a subconsciously connected film script, a series of alternate ‘books’.