The Fetch

Gregory Leadbetter

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781911027096
• eBook ISBN: 9781911027270
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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

Dendrites and Axons

I

Rodin’s Thinker – that was a family myth

for you – penseroso in your chair,

the home doctor your in-laws called,

computer-builder, lone cosmographer.

As a child, I could feel you think – see

your eyebrows in the rear-view mirror,

that motorway look – and play at

thinking myself. Now the noise

of what is missing from your mind

crowds and burrs in mine, leaves

no adequate thought for the day’s clue:

a photograph of the missing person

I’m going to visit this afternoon.

II

The horse came apart as you drew her –

mismatched perspective, split between the Fuseli head

and something that looked like a pig’s rear-end.

This was early enough for a nervous joke

from someone – but though you never said as much,

this was your test, and you knew.

At the hospital, you had to draw a pentagon.

Geometry itself broke open: where

there should have been one, you drew

three, which overlapped like a Venn diagram.

An epicentre in the white space: chaos

in its blossoming fractal.

III

Day and night died too, left you

neither asleep nor awake, but food

for the gut of a corrupted dream.

A body count on fresh-cut grass,

lifeless kids where sparrows should be,

pyjamas on the bed with the dying inside –

the wounded youth who would not survive.

You tried to get out – as if every door

might lead beyond your mind, or back

to the dream of common truth: a marvel

all but lost to you. There was no way out

in fact, but one. You were caught in the glass:

that day you saw your Dad in the mirror

and knew you saw the dead.

IV

The limits not to love

but what love can do: me struck dumb

to find the fact of my love

so wanting in its power to heal, the rage still to come.

The dendrites and axons of love

that bind you to the circuit of the world unravel,

abandon all but love

itself, stubborn and suffering as you buckle.

I want more from love

than love can give, but love does what it can

with earth undone: love

to riffle and raise the dust of the crumbled man.

V

It cannot be done at home.

The walls are open

where they are closed,

closed where they are open.

You fall the stairs, blood

an eye, compress a lung.

It is too much for Mom.

You are here third person.

But just when I think

the man on the sofa

is six months dead,

he wakes, looks and smiles

at me: later, crying,

he calls me his best boy

and you are here, Dad, dying.

VI

The first time you didn’t seem to know me

even the carers never said hello –

as if they knew I was now a cipher,

a shadow-companion to you.

We move out of synch with the room

like unsteady thieves through a crowd

when Phil, on his way for a smoke

grins over and says Hello Doctor –

then sits in the garden, lights up

oblivious. For a moment it’s fun

to be not what I am, and I laugh

for the gift – akin to that first lost

Christmas under greyscale skies:

us, going through the motions,

you, buried in the blizzard

of eyes until the new year

sprang in your sudden dance,

that smile forbidding mourning.

You hurry me past Room 13:

It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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