Green Squall: (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

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 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.

About the Author :
Jay Hopler (1970–2022) earned degrees from New York University, Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Purdue University. He taught at the University of South Florida. He was a National Book Award finalist and the recipient of a Lannan Foundation fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Joseph Brodsky Memorial fellowship. His third poetry collection, Still Life, was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize.

Review :
Winner of the Bronze Medal in the Poetry Category for the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award

Winner of the 2007 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry

Winner in the Poetry: General category of the National Best Books 2007 Awards

Winner of the 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award, given by The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

Winner of the Silver Medal in the Poetry Category for the Florida Book Awards

“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