Excerpts from The Scenic World by Matthew Gregory
If a Leaf Falls Press
This is a book that has been rumoured, resurrected, long-promised and long-deferred – the overdue first collection by Matthew Gregory.
It speaks to the work’s methods and ethos that delay hasn’t affected it at all. These are not poems greatly concerned with labels or movements, trends or discourse. With a few exceptions – and only due to their exploration of specific people and places – they could perhaps have been written any time in the last 70 years. To those who know his work already (from magazines like the London Review of Books and Poetry Review), Gregory does seem like a writer slightly adrift in time. There’s an air of the antique and apocryphal, an interest in the faded and deracinated. It’s telling he finds his most enduring subject in the city of Naples, its overlaying of contemporary and ancient, the palimpsests of sudden life and vivid disaster.
In the first sequence we visit various interiors, of vastly different eras and occupancy – the Roman Republic, 19th century Paris, the Sasquatch Symposium in Montana in 1993. It is hard to define the poems with comparisons – a baroque imagination that might recall Ashbery, Kleinzahler, even Sebald – an eye seemingly able to enter the rooms of history as it pleases, mobile as a roving insect.
The middle section encompasses affectionate portraits, dreamlike visions and European disrepair. This Europe – a ‘sad thesis’ – with its grand squares and familiar ruins, moves slowly, then fast, like the shadow of smoke from the volcano in ‘Circumvesuviana’ – and comes upon our own moment strangely, as a vessel run aground.
The titular last suite imagines a baedeker for a Southern Italian city. Its address is confiding and amused, its colours inherited from its subject, like the girl who looked for too long at the laguna…
These are poems of castellations, cornices and eyries: their spaces are architectural and sonic, and what they show us, with great care and a continued sense of the marvellous, are pictures of uncommon clarity.
July 2025
68pp
Cover design by Alice Ray
Typesetting by O Tong
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