There is a speed limit
from “Finding Your Own Way Home”
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 …
Based on a True Story
David Gregory
Available from late June 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7385824-6-4
paperback; 76 p.
rrp $25
David Gregory writes about the shifting, mutable, post-truth world, where an opinion is more valid than a demonstrable fact, where our recollections – seemingly as clear as photographs – may be just redacted and damaged files. But there is a place where the centre can hold – the poet holding onto the strings of many coloured balloons, or peering into the pictures held within tears.
At the point that our world is balanced on, there is a dialogue between fact and fiction. Based on a True Story is a phrasebook for such times.
In his fourth collection, Canterbury poet David Gregory once again turns tour-guide to the unreliable world of memory and perception, with his typical wit, humility and skill. This is a book to give your activist uncle, your poetry-sceptic neighbour, and your poetry-loving friends alike.
Give us this day …
from “Half a Prayer”
possibly why
my lunch sandwiches had
tumbled all together
half ham
half atheist.
David Gregory is a craftsman. To open this book is to open a drawer made of solid material, there is no veneer here. Its weight has a satisfying resistance, yet the angular lines hold true due to the smooth (but not too smooth) action.
Look closer. The tails David cut from personal memories join the pins he chiselled from common concerns; they dovetail precisely. He has measured and cut each piece to the correct length, so it all holds together. David is a master.
DAVID HOWARD
Father,
from “No Love Lost”
I am the world’s last
speaker of this singular language.
The eight meanings of anger.
The ten types of silence.
How wife had no meaning
and the six smiles
that mother gave us …
David Gregory’s poems are like the best kind of jokes – the deep ones, the profound ones that make you laugh, and then make you think. Beautifully written, with the gentle touch of a master pick-pocket – while you grin at the puns or smile at the lovely image, his poems pat you on the shoulder like an old friend and move on, and it isn’t until later you realise how very much more there was to the encounter. And that he’s got your wallet.
Joanna Preston
I hit upon a strategy
from “Appearances”
for obtaining an illusion
of almost-immortality,
so set myself a long-term task
to appear in many photographs
and never ask …
The most underrated poet in Aotearoa New Zealand delivers again. David Gregory’s work is special because it manages to be perfectly built but also consistently unpredictable—a theoretically-possible balance of order and chaos that isn’t often encountered in the wild.
He writes with certainty and humility. These are sharp portraits of hard-won experience, tinged with the warm light of life’s autumn.
ERIK KENNEDY
It is an old boat, carrying on
from “Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea”
its old argument with the sea;
the kauri planks say this, the ribs agree.
The sea is not listening, but the man is,
waking if the conversation changes;
the boat will tell him everything …
David Gregory moved with his family from the UK to New Zealand in 1982. Something in the air awoke a dormant zest for poetry, and since then he has been widely published within NZ and overseas. A founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective, and one of the two co-founders of Sudden Valley Press, David has been an integral part of the development of poetry in Canterbury for over forty years.
He has worked on coastal environmental issues for most of his working life, and lives with his wife Ann in Ōhinetahi Governor’s Bay.
Sudden Valley Press 