Green Squall by Jay Hopler
Yale University Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Lizard Becomes a Verb
If one is willing to concede significance to the decimal system, there’s some nostalgia associated with Jay Hopler’s first book: he’s become the 100th Yale Younger Poet.
I’m sure Hopler doesn’t mind being lumped in with that crowd, though the payoff in Green Squall comes from the odd way that he’s suited for solitude. The book’s narrator constantly compensates for isolation by acknowledging there’s solace in an imagined relation with his surroundings—a garden, a beer, grass that is "lizarding." By the end, imagination is as real as anything else.
In a short poem, “Of Paradise,” he comments on a fisherman drinking a beer. The man is “Small and gigantic/In his white rubber boots,” and “a black fly is drowning” in the beer. At the end of the poem, the fisherman, the fly, and the narrator are linked: “How sick we are, the three of us,/Of Paradise.”
Over the course of the book, Hopler also does a great job painting himself as a tragicomic figure: he loves small things like clouds and grass; he likes being surrounded by strippers and prostitutes; he still lives with his Mom. A Berrymanesque dialogue develops between him and an unidentified “angel” in “The Frustrated Angel”:
He wants to know how often I’ve been mistaken for a shrub.
The Angel says if you beat someone long enough and hard enough,
They will learn to love you for it.
That’s mighty big talk, isn’t it Hopler—coming from a man who
lives with his mother?
Hopler, I’ve had it with all your crying and complaining. If I
wanted to hear whining, I’d kick a dog.
Apart from the narrator, the "mother" is the only human to enter the book. The fact that there are no witnesses allows him to re-imagine things as he likes, and at times, contradict himself. Usually exultant before sky or trees, he shows a far different imaginative state in “Self-Portrait With Whiskey and Pistol”:
How disappointing it all is!
The lemon trees, the banyan trees, the sky—
How disappointing it all is.
But lines like this reaffirm the fact that strong emotion is strong emotion. The apparent 180s offer the reader savvy shifts in mood; and whether full of glory or frustration, Hopler never becomes indifferent. The outstanding “Out of These Wounds, The Moon Will Rise” shows the way that a sense of one’s surroundings is in flux with one’s emotional and imaginative states:
Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,
And every porch light
in the neighborhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I’d like a new
Way of experiencing the world...
Hopler's only real failures lie in infrequent "why hast thou forsaken me" theatrics. But there's uncorrupted satisfaction when someone notes that imagination itself can sustain someone. And Hopler's place as solitary man in a kingdom of the imagination ultimately makes him more Stevens than he is Berryman (ironically, the book's worst poem calls upon Stevens by name). The ambitious nine-part “Of Hunger and Human Freedom,” the book's centerpiece, falls a little short of its aim, but there are some great meditative moments. Freedom, Hopler writes, is not our natural state: “Our bonds define us, after all.”
Hopler’s work is chiseled, perhaps the best example lying the book’s excellent conclusion, “Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus,” when he's finally buried in his imaginative fusion with his surroundings. The Yale competition was judged by Louise Glück, and to say that such poems are “Glückian” wouldn’t be a stretch, but I suppose that’s natural. It’ll be interesting to see whether he climbs the ranks like many of the 99 before him, or sinks to the bottom of the ocean like many others. I think there's a good case to be made for the former.
--May 8, 2006
