Maskwork

By Gregory Leadbetter

In Gregory Leadbetter's second poetry collection, Maskwork, 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.
The spirit of revival, renaissance, new birth and rebirth haunts this book: and at its core, the idea of poetry itself as a form of learning – an art and a mystery – runs like a quicksilver thread throughout, between the elusive and the certain. Leadbetter's meticulously attuned lyrical poetry tells of the transformative experience of knowing, a dynamic state of being that forever alters both the knower and the known.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913437046

Gregory Leadbetter

Gregory Leadbetter is the author of four poetry collections: Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), the pamphlet The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007), and (with photographs by Phil Thomson) Balanuve (Broken Sleep, 2021). 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.

Book preview

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Maskwork

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Maskwork

Gregory Leadbetter

ISBN: 978-1-913437-03-9

eISBN: 978-1-913437-04-6

Copyright © Gregory Leadbetter, 2020.

Cover artwork: Red-deer frontlet with antlers removed or split to obtain splinters and skull perforated. Star Carr, Yorkshire, England. Donated by Graham Clark. Reproduced by permission of University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology © (1953.61 A).

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Gregory Leadbetter has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published September 2020 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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For my teachers

‘muses, goddesses of learning’

– A Table Alphabeticall (1604)

Contents

Maskwork

Musician

Doe

A Poppet

Gramarye

Two Lost Things

Cara

Labels for the Exhibition of an Hitherto Private Cabinet of Masks

Metaphysician

Tree Script

Archaeopteryx

Two Friends

Personal Computing

Lapse

Apple Tree

Optics

The Swoops

Found in a Wood

Engine Pool, Earlswood Lakes

Tuisto

Modranect

Solstice, Midwinter

Sleepery

Transhumanist Glitch

The Ape at the End of the World

At Porlock Salt Marsh

Interval

Sakadas at Delphi

Terroir

Beorma

Unconscious Minister

Dérive

Lord of Misrule

Europa

A March Nest

Second Best Bed

Sky Burial

Don’t Ask

Fogou

Mg: A Biography

Chess Metaphysic

Scenery

At English Bicknor

Daemon

Consistori del Gai Saber

Quest

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Well — but what is this now and yet other World?

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

– Oscar Wilde

the true mask is the expression of somebody unmasked

– Peter Brook

Maskwork

To teach the mask I make

   to tell the truth, I wear it

   as my own: feel its weight tilt

when it sees the first earthly thing

it loves suffer in its infant being:

   one mask passes to another

   the face that it has learned.

Still it makes no sound, even as

   its senses sow their trance

   where what would be its language grows.

Only when my life has done its work

   and the mask knows more than I could say

   without its visage – then

I take it off. It wears my voice:

   the mask speaks.

Musician

That night plays back scratched vinyl,

but here’s my fiddle.

The lane led way out and I went

though dark had spilt and shook the stars

in black water where I walked,

dressed for day and led by story,

nothing more. The spirits I’d swilled

warmed my blood, but the cold drank.

I knew