Gregory Leadbetter, "The Infernal Garden"

 

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025). His previous books and pamphlets include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2023; Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021; The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). Recent work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). A song-cycle featuring poems from The Fetch by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy has been performed internationally, and a recording with the tenor James Gilchrist was released in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

About The Infernal Garden, by Gregory Leadbetter
In The Infernal Garden, Gregory Leadbetter’s poetry leads us into dark and verdant places of the imagination, the edge of the wild where the human meets the more-than-human in the burning green fuse of the living world. This liminal ground becomes a garden of death and rebirth, of sound and voice, in poems that combine the lyric with the mythic, precision with mystery.

Responding to the intricate crisis in our relationship to our planet and the life around us, the garden here assumes a haunting, otherworldly aspect, as a space of loss, grief and trial, which nonetheless carries within it the energies of regeneration and growth. At the heart of this bewitching book is the force of language itself – at once disquieting and healing – through which we are drawn to the common roots of art, science, and magic, in exquisite poetry of incantatory power.

You can read more about The Infernal Garden on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Infernal Garden

Alchemy

To separate the subtle from the gross

without injury either to spirit or body

I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts

that rise through the stem in green alchemy:

take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,

prune further, into late Greek and Coptic

to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:

the dark root of the art of elixir.

Sceptical of the power of language

to convey the quintessence of wisdom,

language itself learned how to speak hidden –

to sound both the word and its umbrage:

a darkness conducting the central fire:

a form, like a flower, for its signature.

 

Wight

A soft body rises from a forest litter

floor, damp with crumbled leaf – rises from the morning

in skins of light too cold for a sun to enter.

A body, out of place – a mushroom in the spring.

Naked, still unknowing, it wakes to naked things

in splayed and hanging shapes that people from the trees.

Their hard silence loosens: a shadow flies and sings.

The startled body moves – the thing the shadow sees.

It shivers like a man, as if the first to feel

this earthen air so close – a wound that will not heal.

Maybe a man can grow like mould from fallen wood.

He takes a step, almost – breathes and sends a pale mist

that writhes and disappears: he sees himself exist.

If someone asks, say he is born. Do not say dead.