Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

The title may mystify, as will the striking cover image. Leafing through the content though, there are familiar place-names: Clent, Clowes Top and a reference to the Black Country murder-victim Bella. There is homage to Thomas Hardy in the Beany Cliff, and to Hopkins’ The Windhover. When you see White Horse Hill  however, there is already a hint of the ancient, and an interpretation of landscape that may be a departure from those earlier writers.

You will make neither head nor tail of this collection unless you first read Misterioso, the title explained in the notes at the end as an instruction from composers to play ‘mysteriously’. Mystery is the key to Leadbetter’s art, as expressed in this series. At no point does the work offer a defined, secure resting-place for the reader; there are always further flights of imagery through which we are lifted. The effect is unhinging, but pleasantly so because this is music where rhythm is always understated (suggested more strongly sometimes by strict rhyme-schemes) so that tune and sense flow both to the ear and visual mind. And what music. Leadbetter’s poetry is so developed that he need never make do with archaism or ‘poetic licence’; each poem has the naturalness of modern speech and the tone is close, intimate, confessional almost.

Beware. This verse does not on the face seem incantatory but it is: it contains ancient stirrings of chant, of charm, of magic. Beware. Like the speaker in Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn, he on honey-dew hath fed. The movement this verse contains will copy your breathing and infiltrate your blood. You will not break easily from its spell.

But Misterioso is where you the poet’s purpose expressed: to go deeper into things, to break through and find contact with the living world around. He is

drawn to silence like the moth to light:
the life within the one we hear …

and the poems are about the interlocking relations outside oneself, promoting a greater engagement with the natural world, and the world within us

as if the world is something I have found
and the world knows that I am there

in so doing, hearing ‘the whisper of my heart’s work’ he creates music which

returns the tongue
to its own song
gives the blood
its dream

– returning us to earliest humanity, ‘eyes … lit by the fire of what they heard … the cry that carries on the listening skies’. Leadbetter reaches down, very deep, to an original language which will enthral and delight, just as much as it disturbs.