Green Squall
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Jay Hopler; Foreword by Louise Glück
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Format: PaperPrice: $20.00
Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Glück observes in her foreword, “Green Squall begins and ends in the garden”; however, Hopler’s gardens are not of the seasonal variety evoked by poets of the English lyric—his gardens flourish at lower, fiercer latitudes and in altogether different mindscapes. There is a darkness in Hopler’s work as deep and brutal as any in American poetry. Though his verbal extravagance and formal invention bring to mind Wallace Stevens’s tropical extrapolations, there lies beneath Green Squall’s lush tropical surfaces a terrifying world in which nightmare and celebration are indistinguishable, and hope is synonymous with despair.
"The Yale Series of Younger Poets remains the most prestigious [of poetry contests]."—Library Journal
“Insouciance and bravura notwithstanding, there is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens. . . . Green Squall is a book filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance. Always bravura is connected to melancholy, fastidious distinctions to wild exuberance, largesse to connoisseurship, self-contempt to uncontrollably erupting hopefulness. Hopler’s dreamy obscurities and rapturous effusions share with his more direct speech a refusal to be groomed into uncommunicative cool: they are encoded, not unintelligible. He writes like someone haunted or stalked; he wants, simultaneously, to hide and to end the anxiety of hiding, to reveal himself (in every sense of the word), to give himself away.”—from the Foreword by Louise Glück
“The Yale Series of Younger Poets remains the most prestigious [poetry contest], and Hopler’s work is an excellent addition to a list that’s included James Wright, Adrienne Rich, and Carolyn Forche. . . . Highly recommended.”—Library Journal
“An alternately ecstatic and self-deprecating speaker measures himself against a ravishing and disinterested natural world that is sometimes a mirror, sometimes an unattainable aspiration. The dialogue in these 34 poems is mostly between the speaker and himself, allowing for pained self-negations. . . . The best of these poems are truly stunning.”—Publishers Weekly
Publication Date: April 19, 2006
