on Gregory Leadbetter

The Breath of the Dead

The Infernal Garden reads as both locational and taxonomic, embodied in the title poem by the presence of the scarlet elf cup – a florid fungus whose common use in Europe and Native America was as a styptic. Growing best in damp woodland, the scarlet elf cup releases its spores in an audible puff and is known to decompose and reintegrate deadwood. Apparently, it is possible to activate spore release by blowing on the fungus, the elf cup responding not to human breath, but to human warmth. In the context of The Infernal Garden, this cluster of processes is seemingly re-enacted by Leadbetter whose instincts for the Elizabethan surreal and Surrealist alchemical (how apt to have a Leonora Carrington on the cover), positioned through a Rosicrucian lens, create a compelling environment in which to situate death – and those who have encountered death – through a sibilance of breath. ‘The dead are in my ear again’, notes Leadbetter in the opening poem, tonally resigned to this correspondence of spirithood: ‘I almost heard a hlp m / pinch the air alive’, thus almost beginning with a receiving set in his infernal garden as he is visited by the dead whose frequency is activated by biting ‘the word like a mushroom’: the mastic is, of course, the elf cup.

As in the labyrinth, Leadbetter places The Infernal Garden in the centre of this sixty-four-poem-strong collection, and there are centrifugal forces at work in the torsion explicit in his themes and imagery: we gain the sense that ...