No Relation to the Hotel

Abstract

Page 30 American Book Review No Relation to the Hotel Louis McKee Living Will David Hilton Coffee House Press http://www.coffeehousepress.org 104 pages; paper, $15.00 Dear Warren: A new apartment furnished with the death rattles of crickets on an early fall evening. Already I’m known by name at Drug Fair; the varicose waitress calls me “Tuna on Toast with Tomato,” which she can not know is a “meter-making argument” natural childwarbler of the spermy winds that she is. One of my colleagues mourned to me yesterday that she’s “struggling through imagery.” Today is Thursday night, which I’ve decided to live as if Friday didn’t count—I’ll see how far back I can push the week—maybe get wrecked beginning on the Sabbath. David Hilton lived the life of a poet, a more or less typical life, circa late-twentieth-centuryAmerica. Unassuming. Unassertive. Relatively quiet. Born in California (“No relation to the hotel”—his joke carried over as the title of one of his earlier books), he spent most of his adult life in the Baltimore area, teaching for more than thirty years in the local community college and writing his poems in whatever stretches of time he could find or steal. He enjoyed moderate success: haphazard journal appearances, an occasion limited edition book from one or another of the better small presses, inclusion in significant anthologies which burned brightly for a few moments each. He had his readers, and he had a woman, Joanna, who believed in him, to whom he was married in the early seventies, and was with until the end. And then, of course, there was an end, with all the attendant difficulties and discomforts, but with a gentility, too, and a peace of heart and mind, to which the poems in Living Will testify. It’s said that our lives pass before our eyes at the end, that we rethink decisions and recast arguments. Others may choose to stay in the moment, to appreciate their blessings, to tinker a bit longer with the chaos, or perhaps even to rage. In this posthumous collection of Hilton’s poems, there is a bit of all of this. There is nostalgia; a touch of it shows up in the background of an elegy for poet Darrell Gray, whose friendship with Hilton went back to college days, “The Nights of ’67: For Darrel Gray”: “Darrel’s voice so young— / my 22-year-old mentor—husky-pure / from unfiltered Camels….” It is enough to have wanted to be John Keats debating Gaston Bachelard in a one-room room— oh, we all lived in “rooms”—book-crowded mattress on floor, “stereo” speakers exquisitely placed, table bare but for typewriter and debris, and great jugs of Carlo Rossi’s mountain red amid strewn “albums”…. It is obvious, from even his earlier poems, that Hilton had a good ear, and that the noises that occur in his lines are hardly casual, merely accidents. The braided sounds, chimes, and echoes surprise and delight the reader; the poems beg to be read aloud. Crystal fired the burnt umber hillside—everyone tripping to chords and quarks on KSAN crunching and throbbing the long breath of the universe we danced within…. “A ballet for the ear,” John Logan used to call such attention to the music of a poem. It is rare today to find a writer so well attuned. I may be tempted to quibble with the enjambment, the lines breaking on such soft, brittle words as “the” and “we,” but the flow is enthralling, undeniable.And part of this might in fact be the surprise of the line-breaks. There is an honest empathy in Hilton’s poems. One of the true pleasures to be found in Hilton’s work is his turn, in later years, to end rhyme. There had always been a quiet, loose compliance to form in Hilton’s poetry, but Warren Woessner, in his foreword , tells us that “a few years ago” Hilton decided to try (end) rhyme. “Suddenly all his poems rhymed! He did it so well that I didn’t notice it for a year.” Hyperbole , perhaps, but it’s believable...