Based on a True Story, David Gregory
Sudden Valley Press, 2024

Finding Your Own way Home

 

There is a speed limit
on Memory Lane
and the fog doesn’t help.

I am racing my sister
to the next recollection
because somebody has
to claim the truth.

The truth is, there isn’t any
in this fanciful landscape.

You place the house in the sun,
while I remember the rain.

But there is the constant
of our mother,
standing in the doorway
after he left.

And you, sister, on your high horse
and me on my old green bike.

 

David Gregory

What is it that imbues a poetry collection with charisma, that insists you spend as much time with it as possible, that gets you thinking (even more) about what poetry can do and be? Is it the invisible strings that reattach you to the world as you read? Poetry that gets you imagining feeling pondering. Poetry that pulls you towards the unknown, that might settle and resettle, that is deeply and poignantly human. That delivers a fascinating poetry-mesh of motifs, subjects, references, allusions, withholdings. That holds you in clearings and carries you along pathways. Charismatic poetry is all of this and more. Subtle, blazing, nuanced, half shuttered, open hearted.

My life is the colour of water
nothing of itself
but what it borrows.

 

from ‘The Colour of Water’

David Gregory’s new collection, Based on a True Story, is perhaps one of my favourite poetry reads of the year. I never do best picks. Book of the year kind of thing. But reading this book has been exactly what I needed. So here I go, this is my poetry book of 2024.

The collection is divided into three sections that resound with narrative possibilities: ‘Once Upon a Time’, ‘Intermission’, ‘The End of the Beginning’.

The opening poem, ‘Finding your way home’, reinforces the expectation that we are entering poetry fields of travel, that memory will propel trains of thought, that memory is inconstant as much as it is necessary. In the opening poem, there is sun and rain, a high horse and a green bike, and more than anything, pathos. What is spoken fuels what is withheld, what is unspoken fertilises what is said.

Think of this collection as time travel, but also consider it as a meditation on time. There is the way time stalls as you read and the outside world dissolves to the point it is just you and the text. A slow pace of contemplation permeates the writing, and time itself is a recurring theme.

There is a focus on both the particular and the personal that stretches wide to draw in universal themes and motifs: war, sky, the weather, order, chaos, reading the world, floods, flight, beauty, writing the world whether exterior or internal. There is the way those we love might disappear into the shadows after they die, into the slipperiness of unknowing, leaving the mutations of family memories, the footprints of love. I am especially drawn to the poems where the mother or father make an entry. Poignant. One moment I am brimming with a sad ache and the next, moving tenderness.

Her life smoored
in the cold hearth
of her marriage.

 

from ‘Smoor’

We hold the hand of large ideas
big as parents
and so many years
from understanding.

 

from ‘Are We There Yet?’

Ah, I am drawn to poems that deliver philosophy as much as they deliver heart. To take an idea and hold it on your tongue and savour the taste. How does this work you might ask? Let it linger as you taste the sweetness sourness connections. I loiter upon, ‘The sea is the music that plays itself’, I am stalled by ‘Recollection is an old street in a seeping dusk’, and of course, ‘It’s not the speed of light that counts/ as much as / the speed of darkness’.

The future is blank paper
untrodden sand
and the sea’s voice.

Tell me it is not
a story written over
all the other stories?

 

from ‘Based on a True Story’

Linguistic surprises add to the delight in reading this collection; the utter love of what words can do is contagious. Whether it is aural chords, an unanticipated word choice, an agile simile, lithe language that serves our ears ‘Our shadows puddled out before us’, ‘A fine sieve in the sky today / giving us a dust of drizzle’, ‘I peel onions, / watch famine’s spare ribs / through the fly’s facets, television’.

Heart is what I crave when I read poetry this year. I open any page in David’s collection and I am breathing in heart.

David Gregory arrived in Christchurch NZ from the UK on a three year contract in 1982 and found a supportive literary community here. In spite of spending a year back in England on a job exchange, the pull of NZ was strong for him and his family. That whanau has grown to include four grandchildren. He has worked on coastal environmental issues for most of his working life. He has combined this with establishing his reputation as a New Zealand poet with four books to his credit. His poetry has appeared in many NZ publications and a number of anthologies and has been performed at venues in NZ and overseas. David is a founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective. With the late John O’Connor, he established Sudden Valley Press (SVP) and is the current Manager and one of the editors.

Sudden Valley Press page

You can hear David read here as part of Poetry Shelf’s summer readings.