Poetry is such a slippery slope as there is truly no middle ground. There’s literally good poets and bad poets, ones that know how to convey emotion using words as their paint and those who…well…end up dribbling out ersatz sentiment for Hallmark cards. And poetry gets a bad rap sometimes and is often misunderstood by the mainstream who label it and the men and women who produce it as pretentious. Sometimes it is and sometimes there’s nothing wrong with a little pretension…

Author/poet (and according to his bio, mentor and life coach!) Robin Spriggs might be one of the lads who gets stamped with the pretentious handle, but beneath the posturing of his pocket sized collection of “prose poems” DIARY OF A GENTLEMAN DIABOLIST (Anomalous Books), beats a playful, black heart. The book is a rather ingenious little grimoire charting—in fractured, dreamlike form—the trip of a seeker, someone who dives head first into the fevered realms of black magic and beyond, encountering all manner of arcane horror and supernatural phenomena.

In just over 100 pages Spriggs jumps wildly between page-long bursts of prose narrative juxtaposed with paragraph length spasms of abstract wordplay and—if you stick with it—manages to tell a fairly fleshed out tale. There’s certainly nothing here that will change your life, not that Spriggs wants to. DIARY OF A GENTLEMAN DIABOLIST is simply a very creative way to convey a story, challenging, tight, compact and tricky enough for this critic to give it a solid….

 

 

 

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