Green Squall
poems by, Jay Hopler

Review by Mary

Rarely are collection’s titles’ so aptly used. Immediately, we are swept away by an incredible green gust—green, the color of foliation—and dropped in the center of a vivacious garden. We are not even given a moment to push the wind blown hair from our faces before everything surrounding us is once again a buzz:

And the sky!
Nooned with 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.

It is not often that poems feel as alive as they do in Jay Hopler’s collection, Green Squall, which was selected by Louis Glück in 2005 as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The poems emit an exuberance and energy, both shocking and alluring.
Hopler’s poems are intimately bound to the tropical environment of Southern Florida. Despite the abundance of trees, flowers, and birds Hopler’s poetry is not an introspection into nature. His poems are so embedded in this landscape and the landscape in the poem (and the poet) that details like “a pair of African parakeets lands in the backyard” seems as mundane as, say “a car passed by the window.” However, place specifics are few and far between, often all Hopler allows is “in the backyard;’ “the courtyard;” or even more mysteriously “from somewhere deep/Within the squall of all those big/And sloppy blossom/.” He invites his reader to be as familiar with his landscape as he is. This is not the Edenic tropical paradise sought by snowbirds and romanticized or longed for by other cold-climate natives, and Hopler is quick to dispel with this inclination to romanticize his home. The second poem in the collection reads:

There is a black fly drowning in that glass of beer
There is a black fly drowning in that glass of beer.

How can no one notice it,
That black fly?

Black as a zero is useless.
Black as grammar school.

The man with the beer is a fisherman,
Small and gigantic

In his white rubber boots.
How sick we are, the three of us,

Of Paradise.

Whatever notions you had of paradise will not be found here. This is a vibrant place of perpetual unrest—a place where, in a clever twist of formal inventiveness, even nouns are sent into action:

Let spiders suck the light from me
And silk it into corners!

And “verbing” nouns is not the poet’s only trick. Repetition is also often used to surprise the reader:

Father Sunflower, forgive me—. I have been so preoccupied with
my backaches and my headaches,
With my sore back and my headaches and my beat-skipping heart,

The “beat-skipping heart” is an unexpected figurative jump away from the expected pattern. This sort of repetition with variation is threaded throughout the entire book. For instance, the diction, although often unique, is not expansive. The same words pop up again and again—often reworked into a playful pun. It is as though the poet limited himself to only what he could find in his tropical garden.

1
Like fireworks, those wildflowers.
Fireflowers. Wildflowers. The light

Shining out like heat
From their yellow heads—, mind-

Blowing! Their petals, like sparks, falling,
Blowing through the field, setting

The grass on fire—

And a similar thing happens in the title poem when the poet asks “What’s the sugar, Hurricane?” and then “What’s the hurry, sugarcane,” and concludes “This is the sugar./This is the hurry.” The entire collection is studded with this sort of roundabout wordplay, and often seem like a record of the poet’s delight in the discovery of his own word’s acrobatic potential. The recycling of lines and words also enacts the swirling of a tropical storm, and rather than pushing the poems forward, keeps them wrapped up in the present. There is a stasis at the center of all this howling.

Playful inventiveness notwithstanding, the poems in Green Squall are extremely aware of that which has proceeded them in English and American poetry. There are acknowledgements several different techniques and trends that extend from John Donne’s aubades, to the Modernist’s economic use of language. A reader is hard pressed not to hear Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” in the line “a pounce of sky electric.” And there is a touch of Frank O’Hara’s whimsy in “How delightful it would be to lie in bed and think of nothing/But how cool the sheets are and how hot it must be outdoors.”

And yet always stirring beneath these poems that pop like mini-fireworks is the sense they, despite their enthusiasm, are uncomfortable with their own huzzah. Like fireworks their exuberance is only fleeting, and one is correct in sensing an extreme isolation in these pages. The list in “Firecracker Catalogue” is a colorful innocuous burst of ebullience right up to the final line: “Blessèd Family Firebomb”—the joyous display ends here.
Never boring, and never stuck too long in devastation or elation, Green Squall is a mini-storm of its own creation, and I am eager to be swept away by it again.

We cannot love the world as it is,
Because the world, as it is, is impossible to love.

We have only to lust for it—
To lust for each other in it—

And, somehow, to make that suffice.