Push David Gregory (Black Doris Press, 2008) ISBN: 978-0-9582835-0-2 RRP $18

Jeffrey Harpeng

There is a staid double door with beveled glass panels, and brass kick plate, on the cover of David Gregory's latest collection Push. It is an invitation that Rene Magritte could have offered us. A large brass plate bearing the word PUSH spans these doors. The imperative invokes and defies action. Gregory subverts action with wry rhetoric; in ‘Shutters' capturing a thing is the way to lose it.

Shutters

It is not so much
the opening of the eye
of the camera
in which everything
happens that can
happen,
including the end
of the world,
as all worlds end,
instant by instant,
thrown against the
fly-paper of the film.
It is useless to struggle,
but we do, against
misery, against bliss,
like this, when I rise,
to find a brochure
beach printing itself
against the blue,
against the retina.
Wait, wait, I say.
I will get the camera
and lose the moment
utterly.

But the inevitability of loss was already prefigured, "all worlds end, instant by instant, thrown against the fly-paper of the film". He operates with blinking recognitions and shifting considerations that turn quick as a pun. These blinks are often loaded with expansive clarity.

Some days are easier
to carry
Some lift you like a father
how much
more you can see of the world

            (from ‘Weight')

Gregory travels in the ticking present between the sounding of the grace note and the gray fact, or between the gray fact and the sounding of the grace note. In ‘You All Over' a grand scale of causality is condensed in a moment resonant with implications:

I'm sore from scratching the
itch that is you.

And you say a stone
is a stone even when picked from the
shoreline wet as an eye regarding you
from your palm and going blind as
it dries.

You throw it back and I ask,
do you know how long that pebble
took to get this far? And I
mean me, blind in your hand.

His sense of here is the here of culture conditioned to the notion of journeys of discovery, but a culture so geographically pervasive that skepticism has turned that notion to a bruised fruit:

I would give you a map,
but the journey, as to truth,
is through a trackless wilderness.
I would be there to meet you,
but I am high
above, and the steward
is serving what may be
breakfast, and telling me
we are halfway between
remembering and forgetting
and cannot go back even
if we wanted.

            (from ‘A Tour of My Native Land')


Push is a crafty collection that well deserves the high praise of being read and reread, reread and contemplated.

 

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