Backwater Graybeard Twilight by T. Kilgore Splake (Thunder Sandwich Press,147pgs., $17.95)

Combining the best elements of imagism, confessional narrative, and stream of consciousness free verse, T. Kilgore Splake’s Backwater Graybeard Twilight unmasks the beautiful pain of creativity. Frequently abandoning articles, prepositions, and verbs, Splake rushes images into one another, generating foaming discontent and flashing brilliance with the beauty and energy of mountain rapids. A collection of striking black-and-white photographs compliments the images of beauty and decay, suggesting the eternal oppositions of hope and despair.

Initially, Splake speaks with the sauntering banter of a grateful hitchhiker. But that calm, self-possessed style soon transforms itself. In poems such as “dancers,” casual dialogue evolves into “venting rare black angers in words.” Here is a poet who gives us pain as “another way of knowing,” one who has, himself, fallen victim to “wounds too deep to heal.” Time and again, Splake immerses us in “baptisms of madness,” forcing us into feeling “wild passions singing blood songs.”

In “July 5th,” sentiments of Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett season Splake’s “early morning existentials,” that perceive humanity as a mass of “invisible personas, multiple consumed by opaque existence, dead-end jobs, too numb for fantasies.”

Sentiments of T.S. Eliot echo in “renaissance requiem” as Splake mandates “bringing new life into the spiritual wasteland of modern society.” And Splake shows himself to be no stranger to Matthew Arnold’s angst over juggling realities “between life in a new world and threadbare neediness in an old one.” In “full moon traveler,” Splake reminds us that life is ultimately a matter of “serenely accepting going solo.” At the same time, in “obituary writer,” he keeps us acutely aware of our innate struggle against “rat bastard time,” acknowledging that “sadness” is “something to get used to.”

Backwater Graybeard Twilight chronicles the journey of the aging poet who has paid for his art with “pieces of his soul” (“cocaine street of dreams”). But the loss, for Splake, seems worth effort, because the spirit bred of his own personal agony gives him the right and the strength to choose “going out alive, still dancing” (“growing graybeard muerte”).

-- reviewed by Peter Scheponik