Adventures in poetry
The Infernal Garden
Gregory Leadbetter
ISBN: 9781916760240
eISBN: 9781916760257
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 14th August 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
The Infernal Garden, the third collection by Gregory Leadbetter, explores the point at which the natural and the transnatural, the seen and the unseen, the sensuous and the numinous, the wild and the made, meet and fuse.
These poems address psychic renewal and our relation to the more-than-human world through patterns of death and rebirth, in language that combines the lyric with the mythic, precision with mystery.
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.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.
In Gregory Leadbetter’s second poetry collection, Maskwork, mystery, theatre and ritual combine to reveal rather than to disguise. The mask, in these resonant poems, acts as a way of becoming, seeing, and knowing – granting access to altered states and otherworlds hidden within and beyond ourselves. Here, language itself becomes an animating magic, connecting humans to our ecological roots.
Find out more about Maskwork
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.