The Fetch

The Fetch is my debut full-length poetry collection. It is published by Nine Arches Press.

fetch, n.2 : The apparition, double, or wraith of a living person (Origin obscure: possibly Old English faecce)

          n.1.1a: The action of fetching, bringing from a distance, or reaching after
          n.1.2 :  A contrivance, dodge, stratagem, trick
          n.1.3b: The distance that waves can travel continuously without obstruction
          n.1.4a: An indrawn breath, a sigh

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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.

'Leadbetter imbues the lyric tradition with an other-worldly sensibility. What makes me go back to his work again and again is the fact that the surreal flourishes deepen the sincerity rather than distracting or double-parrying. His poetry is uncanny in the true sense: a place of unnerving strangeness where you feel finally at home.' - Luke Kennard

‘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

‘In these emotive and thoughtful poems, the world of the spirit meets the physical world: here are ghosts and jaybirds, lichen and longing side by side. A collection full of quiet intent, testifying to “the overwhelming importance of love.”’ - Jo Bell

‘Leadbetter’s poems are finely-made and quietly powerful – every word is the right word. But they can also be deceptive and unsettling, showing us the darkness at the edges of our everyday lives. As he puts it in ‘The Departed’: “I see what the part of me that died has seen.”’ - Patrick McGuinness

'The Fetch is as goosepimpling as a thriller, has a mythic power and is too moving to read in public.' - Anna Saunders, Founder and CEO, Cheltenham Poetry Festival