“Elegies for an Empire” Reviewed by D. Kinsey

Dana Kinsey is a spoken word artist published in Fledgling Rag, SWWIM, SoFloPoJo, The Champagne Room, IN PARENTHESES, Wild Roof Journal, and more. Her book, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press and was selected as a “Best Dressed” feature for The Wardrobe at Sundress Publications. Visit wordsbyDK.com.

Review of Elegies for an Empire by Le Hilton (Iris G Press)
by Dana Kinsey

In his poem “Before I Go,” Le Hinton tells us:

In this summer cool, maybe we shouldn’t ponder
possibilities that weren’t fleshed, joys that were never
unwrapped, loves not pursued. We only have this moment.
And we are here. Let’s dream a little music. You strum
your moon guitar; I’ll play my sax in a minor key.
We’ll listen to the rhythm of my slowing heart.
“Before I Go” by L. Hilton

It’s deep in this melancholy calling, this moonlit invitation, this Hinton-dream of collaboration where the poet decodes the message he inscribed onto almost every page — we only survive a world of never-ending endings by clinging to ever-pulsing hope. Le Hinton’s book Elegies for an Empire, divided into three sections entitled “Elegies,” “Still Life with Desire,” and “Allies and Ancestors,revolves around death, yet never suggests we succumb to its brutal finality. The book’s backdrop is deadly disease, yet there’s antidotal love in the foreground. There are chilling screams of an American empire, rooted in racism, that should have crashed long ago, yet they are momentarily quelled by spoken-out-loud prayers of a granddaughter in ‘Until We’re Not.” In her litany of what she asks from a god, she says, “I forgot Mr. George and Mr. Floyd, she whispers. / I’ll pray for them too.

Other sounds temporarily mute past and impending tragedies, like Bill Evans’ piano speaking during a rain shower as a “light touch on the roof” in “Meditation on Rain on a Blue Porch, a chord played by jazz legend Thelonious Monk in a poem called by his name, and a gentle plea to “turn to ‘A Love Supreme,’ / the holiest of hymns. Sing, sing with the clouds, / the ice cream, the stillness of your own breath.” Hinton does not spare readers from the desolation of a country simultaneously leveled by COVID-19 and “MELANIN-19.”

Among the elegies he crafts are one for his own mother, whom he lost to the disease and Draylen Mason, a 17-year-old bassist, who was killed by racial violence in 2018 when a bomb was delivered at his family’s front door. He immortalizes Ellis Marsalis, Wallace Roney, and Bucky Pizzarelli, three jazz musicians and teachers, in “Poets Versus the Pandemic.” In addition to mourning, he addresses the fearfulness and fatigue of those attempting survival.

By depicting a tender scene of new lovers who meet in 2020, he reminds us how, despite the horror of world-spread disease, life and love fight to thrive. What begins in the poem “Blind Date” escalates into the couple expressing typical concerns, the sweet, relatable kind. We see what each party is thinking; dramatic irony hovers in contaminated air. When they finally share a pandemic ritual, we know it’s serious, “As she pours sweet peach / sanitizer on his fingers, she cups his creased hand, palm up, in her left, then traces the ridges / of his life line as she rubs the liquid / over his palm. He curls his fingers / around hers as they look up / from the peach, hesitate, then wonder / what should / they risk / next.” Finally, in “And So It Continues” she tells the man they’re expecting a child without words, “She takes a half step back, takes his hand / and places it on her slightly rounded / belly. She looks into him, then smiles.” Hinton’s lines reverberate from darkness, stretch into light, then speak of shadows that will overtake us if we don’t stay open to risks, to challenges, to miracles.

The caveat is that miracles rise to their powers only when we’ve “looked long and hard” into devastation that disables them. In “The Course of Human Events,” Hinton relays a story set on July 4, 1938. An 8-year-old black girl, eager to watch fireworks, longs for vanilla ice cream. Her simple desire is thwarted by a “white stare,” a “searing voice,” a “blanched tone.” What began as the possibility of joy in a country celebrating freedom on its designated day ends this way, “There was a black girl on a broken sidewalk. / No ice cream, / no 4th, and no July.” The inhumanity, captured by a scarcity of words and repeated negations, clouds all goodness.

It looms above us still, filling poems with questions like in “Traffic Stop: Internal Conversations of a Black Man,” where the speaker queries, “I wonder what his theory of stopping me is. To insure domestic tranquility? My heart rate isn’t tranquil right now. I read about a man who was stopped at the airport by a TSA agent for talking to god. My god must be busy right now.” Similarly, in the poem “How We Pray,” Hinton presents one scenario for each day of the week including a sax-playing mystic, a woman with a terrorist lover, a husband cradling his wife’s remaining breast post-cancer, a 6-year-old sheltering under a desk in a school under attack, a grandfather on a prayer rug mourning the murder of his daughter, a fingerless rabbi still gathering his people, and a golfer, pocketing his phone before teeing off. While this poem holds only grief in its body, the title “How We Pray” urges us to continue hauling dreams even when they seem futile.

Le Hinton pushes hope like a wheelbarrow through a barren desert.

Note: “MELANIN-19” is a song by musical artist Thelonius on his 2021 album #TheRavenelStimulus.