Yesterday I received t.kilgore splake's new book "A Celebration of Samantha" in the mail, and I read it in one sitting. It's an epistolary chapbook about a greybeard poet called splake (wonder where t. got the idea for that?) beginning a new love affair with a younger woman, waitress Elizabeth, who has a beguiling young daughter Samantha. Of course, this story, told gently, without phoney plot contrivances to keep you hooked, provides a framework for meditations on the past and what it means to be an older man pursuing an individualist vision--his "left bank" dreams--in a world that has no time for variety. So, familiar splake territory. But if you like splake, your appetite for his very definitive style and content probably can't be sated anyway. And if you don't, you can always do something else. Like try to write better than he does, eh? Comes fantastically presented with a set of evocative black-&-white photos.
Contact the Vertin Press for details.
1 comment:
have read a good deal of splake's
"poetry." i don't think it would be difficult to eclipse spalke's
quality, though to be as prolific as splake would be incredibly difficult.
not to be too hard on him, i wonder how much of splake's work would have seen the light of day had it not been self published.
i think splake could have been good had he been able to step outside of himself / had he been able to present something more than ruminations.
his seeming preoccupation with
"young femmes" as he puts it so often, makes me wonder.
yes, splake is a legend, but can someone please tell the world why?
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