environment and space 153near the end of King Lear: ‘He that parts us shall bring a brand
from heaven / And fi re us hence as foxes’ ( 5. 3 ), gives us an intense
sense of affi liation as well as a threat of a brutal separation. Sinclair
continues by highlighting the impression of imitation and role
play. Drawing our attention to the word ‘heat’, he suggests that we
link it with ‘simple terms such as “Big” or “White” ’ to be imper-
sonated by Lee Marvin. Both White Heat and Big Heat are fi lms
from the fi lm noir era, the former starring James Cagney and the
latter Marvin, whom the speaker considers to be the lesser actor,
providing a mere simulation of Cagney’s malevolent presence.
These impressions prepare us for violent action and encounters
with the law.
The poem negotiates the psychology of mass rioting in the
city space and the spatial environment is perceived as a stream of
associative impressions that intersect with one another. As Robert
Hampson states, Sinclair’s approach to the city interrogates ‘its
maps through purposeful drifting’ in what he terms ‘compulsive
associationism’.^45 This impulse in Sinclair’s poetry is described
by Jenny Bavidge as encouraging ‘a way of reading that is not con-
cerned with excavating the city, with looking beyond surface detail
to fi nd a London sensibility... but which produces a constant
stream of association on the horizontal plane of the text itself.’^46
‘hence like foxes’ challenges any claim to authentic representa-
tion. The poem’s law enforcers are reminiscent of 1980 s television
police dramas with Rover cars to ‘haul ’em off’ (p. 97 ). Linking the
enforcers with fascism, they are described as fans of the ‘simplest
situation’ (p. 97 ). Running with the rioting crowd, the speaker hal-
lucinates a ‘dazzling blonde’ that then leads to an eroticisation of
violence as men ‘sublimate erections into truncheons’ (p. 97 ). In
‘scraps & green heaps’ a walk past a scrapyard ends in the defamil-
iarising image of redevelopment in Canary Wharf as ‘a whole tray
of bright cutlery / exploiting opportunity’ (p. 112 ). Sinclair sets
up a formidable disjunction between locality and the architecture
of economic power. Performing ‘psychogeographically’, Sinclair’s
writing displays a movement between localised sites and specifi c
spaces as well as a constant revisiting and re-experiencing of spaces.