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.
"This is heavy-metal poetry, dark and decidedly theatrical." - Jeremy Wikeley, 'The best poetry books of 2025 so far', The Telegraph.
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978-1-916760-25-7 (9781916760257)
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Gregory Leadbetter's books and pamphlets of poetry 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. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.
