Faucher review of The Way It Was

There is no doubt the poems collected in this svelte

volume have been memorially lived in they must
negotiate a world with and without words.
Gutteridges poetic offerings do not rely on complex
conceptual acrobatics, but are seemingly designed as
accessible snapshots of life, a snippet of sentiment, the
sudden reanimating blush of a faded history. Gutteridge
takes as much pains in where to stagger these free-verse
poems as he does in staggering the memories they
contain.
Each tells a story in the form of a vignette, its context
established quickly like the flash of a photographers
bulb. They resolve their story only relatively, a discrete
interval as each is a textual image in an album composed
of pictures broken up by silences and spaces where
words retreat. Accented with very memorable imagery,
such as the widow Mrs. Bray being bee-deep in the
flowers, or the tasteful alliterations of glittering
gladioli and dappling daze, all serve to call us home to
our humble archive of memories to delight in those
moments when the slap of a strap, an engine drone, the
spectacular light of the crepuscular evening and the
passage of life to a wordless world are personally
profound events.
Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world
of velvet voices and muttering mortars in a memorial
transfer from past to present, from present to beyond.
Kaen Faucher, The Western News