Green Squall

By Louise Glück and Jay Hopler

Book Overview

Announcing the 2005 recipient of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize

Jay Hopler's Green Squall is the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. As Louise Gl ck 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300114540
• ISBN13: 9780300114546
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

The Exterminating Angel

He makes up new words when the old ones just aren't hitting the mark, such as his use of 'lizarding,' in the line "The grass was lizarding." His idea of a garden is different than the traditional Marvell garden of poesy, for he's from Florida and the airs and breezes of the Caribbean are never far away. People there have different ideas of what to do with their leisure. In another poem he rebukes Wallace Stevens for writing poems about Florida based on only casual, nearly imaginary visits only. Lately there's been a lot of questioning Stevens, but rarely on grounds so amusing; not only amusing but absolutely challengeworthy. Those of us who think of Key West because we read a poem by Wallace Stevens have things absolutely wrong, and Hopler is a good corrective, for he makes Florida seem dreary, mother-ridden and squashed with overdetermination, more like a spiritually impassable kingdom of Middle Earth than Steven's exotic Martin Denny stereosphere of birds calling, rain splashing, tiki worshipping. Rhythm of a very different sort haunts his lines; from repetition, the simplest of childs' tools, he builds the kind of music Harry Partch might have envied. Bukowski too: "There is a black fly drowning in that glass of beer./ There is a black fly drowning in that glass of beer." Not by beer alone but through simple loneliness and also, the mistakes of FEMA, do we drown like black flies. "The man with the beer is a fisherman,/ Small and gigantic/ / in his white rubber boots." Cunningly an allegory of race relations, the black and the white, is built up from a few small simple and sensual details, largely color and texture. Hopler takes on big themes, but delivers in small strokes, like a master barber giving you the shave of your life. He speaks of the light "one finds in baby pictures" and he nails it as "old/ and pale and hurt" thus closing the circle on an entire misspent life. As he says, the big things such as the death of one's father jolt one to life, but it's the small things from which we derive our misery. An angel beats and beats each of us until we learn to love the pain. Once again Louise Gluck has pulled forth another winner from a long supply of winners.

Enjoyable to read

I very much enjoyed this collection. The voice is intimate, compelling, authentic, feels honest, curious, and contemplative. I got the sense of isolation and doubt but the speaker is also sensitive, funny, and inquisitive, so the voice rarely drifts into complete nihilism. There are also moments of humor and self-mockery. I wouldn't say it's without any pretension, but those moments are usually buffered by humility or self-contempt. He uses repetition in fresh ways and it becomes a formal device but never monotonous--not only repeating lines and phrases, but images are repeated, symbols, landscapes. It makes for a nice feeling of progression in the book. The poems take risks and sometimes they succeed as wildly and vividly as Lowell in his most eccentric moments, for example in the poem "The Frustrated Angel." Other times (for me) it felt too much like a puzzle and not poetry, for example "Firecracker Catalogue," --although that may be more reflective of my own taste than of his talent, which is obvious. But even with the few poems that were not my cup of tea, I still thought this collection was potent and enjoyable. I would recommend it.

heartbreaking

The most remarkable debut collection I think I've ever read. Jay Hopler explores a vivid, plangent emotional terrain, wrestling out the difficulties of faith and love and longing with an elegance that re-imagines the expressive capacity of language. A well-deserved award-winner, a major talent.