The Infernal Garden
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
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
