The River Serpent, and Other Poems

The bulk of Gregor's new work is based on the idea of memory fragments, bits of youth and age now distant. In one poem, the writer scoops up such fragments with ``a long invisible net,'' taking them ``away with me/ into a vastness greater than sky's,/ into an indistinct expanse,/ an altogether other sense of time.'' The poems frequently recall a tragic mother and the son who loved her well. ``Unknowingly'' tells of the mother's ``sorrow and/the sadness that had hindered her/ from loving him tenderly.'' Other pieces present glimpses of Bombay, Trivandum and Dubrovnik, among other places. While interesting, the fragmentation inherent in Gregor's conception can make, at times, for fractured reading. In ``Mozart in Chatillon,'' for example, a potentially lovely line is buried: ``Memories, of course./ Of myself, a boy of twelve, at a concert of/ the school orchestra where I sat last/ among the second violins; and that,/ spotting my mother in a front row,/ affected by her distant beauty,/ I had sensed, however vaguely, even then/ her sadness, the irreversibility/ of choice, the stubbornness of fate,/ and could not, much as I might/ have wished to, alter any of it.'' (Dec.)