This collection of snapshots from Neil Leadbeater is as clean-cut as the jewels that inspire ‘Diversion’, the fourth of its five sections. His perceptions alive to the details that assemble the world he moves through, Leadbeater can turn on a sixpence to produce a playful pun, a sensual nudge, a surprisingly pointed observation.

Some of the poems demand to be read slowly, as if each word, each image, each fact is key to a personal experience, a code to unlock a life. Others are, in the words of the sub-heading to ‘Diversions’, a playful “exercise in skiing off-piste”.

In Section I the key sights of Italy incite in this poet a series of questions and concerns: who? why? what? when? and very relevantly, whether?. Questions about the angle of the Tower of Pisa; a worried note about the rate of Venice’s forecast submersion by the waves is followed by puzzled speculation about a priest spotted daily in Nike sneakers and running shorts, in full flight in the street of an Italian town. Gardens in Padua awaken pleasurable thoughts of lilac’s colour and scent, a list of varieties of Syringa vulgaris and a glimpse of “how we use to lie in its bushy thicket”. Saints and horticulturalists, landscape artists, musicians and architects are intertwined in intense, sometimes tangential lines, the factual intersecting with the personal.

In the final section, ‘London Days’, the poet turns the same gaze on the suburbs of London: Arnos Grove, Hainault, South Acton and Enfield are mined for their meanings, historical, personal, existential. We are taken to the almost-rural edge: looking from the Roding Valley, “London is a heat haze / shimmering in suburbia.”

There’s a memory of a childhood visit to the zoo, where he imagines that the animals have, like himself, been transported from a previous home:

 

     Paradise is a return ticket to the

     rainforests of Surinam, high

     Arctic Tundra, South African Veldt,

     a place where the climate suits all year,

     somewhere they can all call home,

     anywhere but here

 

Read at a sitting, or dipped into, this collection offers a rich sample of the poet’s ‘slantwise’ experience of travelling in Italy and at home in London. I found it enjoyable and full of light as its title promises.

 

Neil Leadbeater, Italian Air / Radiant Days, Cyberwit.Net $15