A Poem by Gregory Leadbetter

Garden Chair

I think of what shouldn’t have died
when I see the chair, all garden wide
in a sphere of grass and unseated sky,
placed in a way for which there is no why,
angled to catch neither sun nor a sight
but slant as a gnomon raised to the light.

There’s something indulgent in its state of abandon
among Saturday sounds of work getting done
over the hedges that frame its ground.
It lives in the idling hour I’ve found.
Bees attend flowers without a name.
The slouch of a mind attempts the same

but finds the chair in place of its rest:
uneasy space, an egg from a nest
unhatched but empty. Its ironwork, made
for a human shape and its shiftless shade
is wrought as climbing twine and leaf.
The chair is the lull and the throne of grief.

Gregory Leadbetter’s books and pamphlets of poetry include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2023; Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021; The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016); and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). A new collection, The Infernal Garden, will be published in August 2025. Recent work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). A song-cycle featuring poems from The Fetch by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy has been performed internationally, and a recording with the tenor James Gilchrist was released in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.