Price £9.99
ISBN : 9781911027096
Date: October 2016
Format: Paperback
Extent: 80 pp
POETRY
‘His poetry is uncanny in the true sense: a place of unnerving strangeness where you feel finally at home.’
– Luke Kennard
Gregory Leadbetter’s first full collection of poems, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, illuminating the unseen. With their own rich alchemy, these poems combine the sensuous and the numinous, the lyric and the mythic.
Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, where life and death meet. Powerful, imaginative, and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal.
‘The Fetch is a terrific, precise and dazzling collection. The whole book exemplifies a poetry of being that shows what is possible when we allow ourselves to be fully human in our perception and poetry.’
– David Morley
‘Gregory Leadbetter tugs a forelock to the Romantics in these emotive and thoughtful poems. The world of the spirit meets the physical world: here are ghosts and jaybirds, lichen and longing side by side. A collection full of quiet intent, testifying to “the overwhelming importance of love.”’ – Jo Bell
‘Leadbetter’s poems are finely-made and quietly powerful – every word is the right word. But they can also be deceptive and unsettling, showing us the darkness at the edges of our everyday lives. As he puts it in ‘The Departed’: “I see what the part of me that died has seen.”’ – Patrick McGuinness
Gregory Leadbetter's debut full-length poetry collection, The Fetch, will be published by Nine Arches Press in October 2016. A pamphlet of poems, The Body in the Well, was published by HappenStance in 2007, and his work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, The North, Agenda and elsewhere, including several anthologies. His book on Coleridge’s poetry, the transnatural and the dilemmas of creativity, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English (formerly CCUE) Book Prize 2012. He has written radio drama for the BBC, and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013. Gregory is Reader in Literature and Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, where he is Director of the MA in Creative Writing and the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing.
This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way.
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.