The Fetch E-Book

Gregory Leadbetter

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 42

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

The Fetch

The Fetch

Gregory Leadbetter

ISBN: 978-1-911027-09-6

Copyright © Gregory Leadbetter, 2016.

Cover artwork: ‘Untitled 132’ © Eric Lacombe

www.ericlacombe.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Gregory Leadbetter has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published October 2016 by:

Nine Arches Press

PO Box 6269

Rugby

CV21 9NL

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

The Russell Press Ltd.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For Freya and Eloise

and in memory of my father

Frederick William Leadbetter

Contents

Whisht

The Fetch

The Departed

Stalking

Who Put Bella In The Witch Elm

The Pact

Homo Divivus

Gloaming

Lifespan

Midsummer at Clent

Elect

Sum

This

Foolslove

Lessons for a Son

Statuary I

My Father’s Orrery

Dendrites and Axons

Pumpkin

Feather

Doggerland

White Horse Hill

Renewing

Misterioso

Sea Change

The Leap

Arcadia

Bat-Light

True Story

Baby Monitor

Masts

The Astronaut’s Return

The Chase

The Body in the Well

Statuary II

The Hollow

Descent

Deadheading

Clairvoyance

Black-necked Grebe

Peregrine

Gibbet Lane

Mirror Trick

Imp

Cradle

Notes

Acknowledgements

fetch, n.2

1. The apparition, double, or wraith of a living person

‘In this state of mind was comprehended what is called Poetic Faith before which our common notions of philosophy give way’

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Whisht

Come to this clipping from my hair.

Make a ring of a curl I wore.

I’ve told you all the truth I know

from the quietus of my pillow.

When I speak your words I feel you

like a wish blown through a candle.

*

Come to this – my bottled breath

warm enough for you to live.

I take up a feather, air-write to you

in magpie black and iridescent blue.

I swallow the pips of an apple core

to grow the godwise food you are.

*

Come to this papercut bleb of my blood

while it is here on my finger to suck.

You know what you have taken from me

better than I have senses to see.

I lay you a trail from a tomb to my door

in photographs, one for each living year.

*

Come to this seed in the palm of my hand.

I’ve held out my arm as long as I can.

I dry out my sweat, leave you the salt

of my fervid body, torrid or cold.

I set a fire to bring the dawn

and the far imago trying to be born.

*

Come – I’ve given all you need of me.

Spell out in silence my other name.

I hold my tongue like a flame.

The Fetch

The dream that slammed the bedroom door

but didn’t break the film of sleep

to tell the time, or give me more

than broken promises to keep

to phantoms that were never there,

woke me just enough to know

that something was: the restless air,

the waveform of a note too low

to hear, a song to raise the dead.

I listened, and began to speak

as I am speaking now. My breath

condensed. I saw it slowly take

the outline of a child, afraid

of the dark of which it was made.

The Departed

A country road I had driven for years

drawing me into its green lane

bent my car around a corner,

saved my life. I felt a tangent

leave my centre, travel on

into the waiting trees, a heartbeat escaping.

Later, this momentum forgotten,

a word spoken miles away

sat me up in the middle of the night.

My mother told me my great aunt had written

to say she was sure it was me she had seen

crossing a bridge at dawn in New Zealand

while I was asleep in England.

A friend called to say she could swear

it was me she noticed late one evening

leaving a bar in the company of strangers,

laughing, joking in fluent Portuguese.

I looked different, she said, just familiar enough

for her to believe I had learnt a new language.

I was introduced to a friend of a friend

at a party, who stared to the back of my skull

with Black Forest eyes. A bottle of wine

later she whispered, when we were alone,

‘You’ve got a nerve, du schlechter Mann,’

smiled a secret, as if I knew what to do

with the number she folded into my hand.

Letters arrived in a child’s writing,

always with pictures of a man and a woman

dancing under a crayon rainbow.

I began to leave the post unopened

when the message was always the same,

asking me when I’d come home again.

All this led me to this afternoon,

a séance in a mirror, face to face.

My hands are pressed to the cooling glass,

my eyes are closed in the circle of arms.

A two minute silence adapts my vision

to the breathing darkness. I see