Green Squall (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

by Jay Hopler

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.