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.

Gregory Leadbetter, "Maskwork"

Gregory Leadbetter is the author of two poetry collections, Maskwork (2020) and The Fetch (2016), both with Nine Arches Press, as well as the pamphlet The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007), and (with photographs by Phil Thomson) Balanuve (Broken Sleep, 2021). His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012. He has published widely on Romantic poetry and thought, twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and he has written poetry and radio drama for the BBC. Five poems from The Fetch have been set to music for piano and voice by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy (listen here). He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

About Maskwork

By Gregory Leadbetter

In theatre and ritual, a mask acts an organ of becoming, seeing, and knowing. It embodies and enables an altered state, both in its wearer and its witnesses: grants access to an otherworld, to mysteries hidden within and beyond ourselves, to experiences that call to and quicken powers of life and being. Poetry has always been akin to theatre and ritual for me, in this way, and the title of this book, Maskwork, expresses that connection. It is also a riposte to literal-mindedness, and the damage it inflicts upon us. But how can the imaginary be real?

When the right conditions have been created, the non-realism of the imaginative act cuts through the passing show that for most of us, most of the time, passes for reality, to speak to the fundamentals of our being: the ecstatic wakefulness we know in love, compassion, sex, desire, fear, awe, and wonder. In this way, the show – the theatre, the ritual, the art – of poetry touches the roots and springs of our reality, the fibres of its making. It acts as a germinal power on our feeling and thinking, our empathy and our agency – our capacity to communicate with and act in concert with the astonishing fabric of our own lives: a fabric continuous with the greater life that we inhabit, in all its mystery, visible and invisible, unactual but active.

That’s what I want from poetry, and what I hope the poems in Maskwork give to their readers.

To learn more about Maskwork, and to hear the poem ‘Archaeopteryx,’ you can watch the trailer for the book here. You can read ‘Archaeopteryx,’ and a note about its composition, here.

Below you can read one of the poems from Maskwork.

Gramarye

I want speech that makes my skin
more than the book I have made
of its membrane
   silent as lips
   at the mouth
that leans from the air

   and this is how
that work in my flesh began:
the desire that drew me like sap
to its tip, where I hung by my voice
   from the whispering ash
   that grew in the garden
   it made of my death
for runes cut by the tongue to touch
every beginning that is to come
to the egg from which I was born.

I learned to know love by the names that I made
and the names took bodies of their own
that glistered with the dust of their home:
unblinking at the strangeness of what I had done
in piercing their silence, sending my voice
to open as an iris under their sun:
they pluck it from the pulsing earth and come.

I have woken to moonlight leaking from the wound:
   the skin that I speak with
   fresh with the blood of its wish.

‘Gramarye’ was shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2020.