Green Squall, Jay Hopler’s first collection of poems, was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Green Squall also received the 2007 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, a 2007 National “Best Books” Award from USA Book News, a 2006 Florida Book Award, and a 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book-of-the-Year Award. He was also the recipient of a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation and the Rome Prize in Literature (The Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a gift from the Drue Heinz Trust) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters/the American Academy in Rome. His work appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Purdue University. Hopler was also the editor of a literary anthology of writings about hit men, entitled The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire (Overlook Press, 1996), as well as the co-editor (with Kimberly Johnson) of Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale University Press, 2013). He was Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Jay Hopler passed away in 2022.
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Green SquallPoemsFrom"In the Garden"
And the sky!
Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm
Of an empty nursery.
Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.
The grass was lizarding,
Green and on a rampage.
Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.
Noon. This noon –
Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.
The grass was lizarding
Green Squall:Poems -
Green SquallPoemsFrom"With Both Eyes Closing"
How high and white the moon!
And vampired—.
Like the light a child
Sinking sees.
A child pushed by its mother
Through the hole in the ice.
Green Squall:Poems -
Green SquallPoemsFrom"The Conjugal Bed"
The banyan trees
Are empty; great flocks of peach-faced lovebirds once
Roosted in them, allopreening and eating those berries
Swollen by the moist, August heat to an almost sexual
Bursting.
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With nothing left to eat them, the berries fall and ripen
And split, spilling blood-colored pulp in thick, reeking
Streams that seep into the stump-holes where the palm
Trees used to be.
Green Squall:Poems
"The book unfolds with an ingenious rhythm, encompassing and modulating extremes of expression that run parallel to the extravagances of the portrayed world . . . Green Squall . . . is a lively affair of the whole being." —Ron Slate, Blackbird
“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 [on Green Squall]
“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
Selected Works
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