About Greg
Gregory Leadbetter is a poet, critic, and academic. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.
He is the author of Wording (Hazel Press 2026), The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025), Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021) Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016) and the pamphlet The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012. He has published widely on Romantic poetry and thought, twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and he has written poetry and radio drama for the BBC.
Five poems from The Fetch have been set to music for piano and voice by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy.
He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.
Publications
Wording, On Language and the Living World
June 2026
An essay exploring the capacity of poetry to re-vivify the language we use to describe the living world.
‘Language needs poetry to revive the relation between knowing and unknowing – to keep open the inlet of mystery.’
The Infernal Garden
August 2025
In The Infernal Garden, we are lead 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
Caliban
April 2023
Long after the tumultuous events of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban returns to the island, having been given his freedom by Prospero and entrusted with a secret task. Experimenting with the resonance of texture and sound that he discovers in the lyrical interplay between Elizabethan and contemporary English, Gregory Leadbetter gives an authentic new voice, and an intriguing new life, to this most enigmatic of Shakespeare’s creations.
Balanuve
October 2021
A sequence of poems about a mythical city, charting its decline to its resurrection. Leadbetter’s poetry sings with the sweetly intoxicating music of Yeats and moves like a flag flapping in the wind around a ruined castle. Balanuve is a luxurious, mysterious, and voluptuous book complemented by the haunting photography of Phil Thomson. A collaboration of the highest order.
Maskwork
September 2020
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.
Fetch
October 2016
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.
Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination
March 2011
Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a ‘Daemon’: a being superstitiously feared as ‘a something transnatural’. Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge’s poetry and the fabric of his philosophy.
Film & Audio
The Fetch – Song Cycle
Composed in 2019, “The Fetch” is a song-cycle by composer-pianist Eric McElroy that sets five poems by poet Gregory Leadbetter. In this unique poetic and musical collaboration, McElroy and Leadbetter celebrate the ability of art to reawaken the mystical in the ordinary – to unleash what Leadbetter calls ‘a sense between the skin and something understood’.
Book Trailer – Maskwork
Poet Gregory Leadbetter reveals the themes and ideas behind his poetry collection, Maskwork, and reads his poem ‘Archaeopteryx’.
BBC Radio 3 – Metal City
How has metalworking affected the culture of Birmingham? Gregory Leadbetter’s poem traces this story from the discovery of ore in the dark ages to the birth of heavy metal music.
BBC Radio 4 – One to One
Acclaimed gardening writer, Alys Fowler, tries to work out where she wants to live, in the city or the countryside, with the help of poet, Gregory Leadbetter.
BBC Radio 4 – Write Brummie
A portrait of a writing day in Birmingham. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 17 February 2020. With specially composed verse by Gregory Leadbetter.
Further work
Get in touch
To email Gregory Leadbetter, please use this contact form.
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