CM: There's a line in White Goods: 'They became what they beheld' -- which obviously comes from a Romantic source - Blake, perhaps? And it's an expressive possibility that re-emerges again throughout your work; in Landor's Tower, the poet Tunstall experiences a feeling of 'joyous recognition' as he propels himself beyond a sense of the purely physical city, and becomes aware of its intrinsic transformative potential -- as a poetic form awaiting creative transcription. In this moment of self-realisation, 'light that is heat [came] from within, fused with the light of the world; in movement, definition. A riot, a ravishment; a chaos out of which he ... would retrieve or recognise order. And form. A unitive commingling with the pollen of the cosmos'.

IS: Yes, Blake. It's interesting you mention that, because I've just finished this book in which I follow John Clare's walk from Epping Forest to a village north of Peterborough, and there's a point in that where he and his wife Patty, when they're courting, both look at the same thing and become as one. By looking at a single, natural feature - a river, or whatever it is - in that gaze, you become one with each other, and one with the landscape. That too contains my sense of the sublime.

CM: Do you also encounter this sense of the sublime in relation to works of art - to paintings, sculpture, etc.?

IS: I don't know what you'd call it; it's a sort of Joycean epiphany (or prejudice). You see something -- a work of art, a film, a piece of junk on the street, any kind of experience that lifts you into another realm, a parallel existence -- and then, as you move about the streets, mired in the mundane, you can attempt to burn a hole in the membrane of the ordinary. Heavenly light can come glimmering through.