Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
The Infernal Garden
Gregory Leadbetter
Available to pre-order, the book will be dispatched close to publication date, 14th August 2025
ISBN: 9781916760240
eISBN: 9781916760257
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 14th August 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
Cover artwork: ‘The Juggler’ Leonora Carrington, 1954
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.
Praise for The Infernal Garden
'Gregory Leadbetter’s The Infernal Garden - in which the natural world is both revealed and cultivated by a poet of exceptional complexity and clarity - is its own dawn chorus, a multitude of voices, note perfect, brimming and melodious. But sung so gently. Almost hushed. This collection is a masterclass in harmony and pitch.' - Jim Crace
‘Above the lulling cadences of Leadbetter’s perfect musical ear rises a gothic and prescient vocabulary that sings and also singes. A child is pulled from a flower bed and a plant is torn at its root. A creepy raven is ‘almost human’, while an English summer bodes ‘Saharan dust’, ‘skeleton ash’, ‘dessicated milt’ and ‘strangling thirst.’ These are songs of grief and rupture -- but also of excavation and transcendence. The ‘word’ forges a connection with the 'weird’ (i.e. the ghostly) through Leadbetter’s gifts as a listener and as a master of phrasing, in poems that release an astonishing force of transformative imagination.’ - Kathryn Maris
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.
You may also like...
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.
