A Review
of Jay Hopler’s Green Squall
by
Carrie Moniz
Never before had I been so intensely
present in a garden as I was when I made the journey with Jay Hopler. The sky
was unbelievably blue, the shade was fleeting and “leaf-laced,” and
the light was almost too heavy to bear. The moment readers pass through the
gates into the lush pages of Green Squall
they will hear the faint click behind them and realize they are locked in for
the duration.
Hopler’s playfulness with
language balances the tremendous weight of heat, loneliness, and despair that
plagues and makes a prison of his garden. The “lizarding” grass,
the “vampired” moon, the “pornographic asphalt,” set
the stage for the experiences and emotions that are at once beautiful and binding;
sensual and maddening.
The brutal Floridian climate becomes
something much more in these pages: an oppressive force, a living, breathing
myth, a reason to live and wish, too, for an end. These understandings, as
Hopler points out in Academic Discourse
at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light, were overlooked
by Stevens, who only “visit[ed] once in a while”:
…
More
violent, than Stevens knew—
It
gets inside your head and shreds
Things,
dismantles memory, shorts out the will; even now, at six
O’clock
of a Friday evening, the light here in
Banging,
rattling buildings, burning through the park’s green pelt.
This never
happens in a Stevens poem.
Stevens’ are not the only
perceptions challenged by Hopler. There are several instances when he questions
and refutes his own claims and ideas. In the sequence On Hunger and Human Freedom, parts 2 and 7 revisit those
immediately preceding them. In part 2 the previous concept of a cardinal being
“Lean and summer-hungry” is challenged: “Summer-hungry, can that be right? / I didn’t think things
went hungry in the summer.” This is a refreshing technique—one that
suggests to the reader that Hopler writes what comes first to his mind about
observations and experiences, then re-examines those ideas without erasing what
was instinctive. In part 7, he again leaves the instinctive intact, but instead
of questioning it he makes a more profound realization, and changes the word “suffice”
to “sacrifice.”
The burden of memory and the past is
another weighty theme of this collection. The poem, That Light One Finds in Baby Pictures begins with the line,
“Being born is a shame—,” and ends with, “The
picture—. No, the baby’s
blurry.” The loss of innocence, of a time when one was cared for and
nurtured above all else, is expressed in terms of the light in the photos being
“old / And pale and hurt—.” It’s as if the essence of
the being—the baby in the photo—has been damaged and faded by light
and time. Whether porch light or flashbulb; sun, moon, or stars; one can see
and feel light invading then retracting from Hopler’s writing like
apparitions.
Cardinals, goddesses, wildflowers,
light. All of these things are seeming apparitions in the world Hopler has laid
down for us in this collection. He pays such careful attention to brief
moments—passing clouds and shadows, falling leaves, field mice, and
silence—every molecule seems to take on a life of its own.
The poems are so full of sensation,
connection, and vitality; one can’t help but hear and see things lurking
in shadows, in parking lots, under shrubs. The constant questioning and
revisiting makes the reader wonder if what he or she has just read was a dream,
or even the slow unraveling of a madman. Other times, reality flies from the
page with a quick slap: a fly drowning in beer, “Black as a zero is
useless.” And such moments of reality inspire the mind to wonder at such
bold statements. A zero, a representation of nothingness, is immensely
significant when combined with other numbers. A fly is essential to the process
of decay and disposal. A man, alone, often suffers from feeling he has no
purpose—that he might as well go the way of the drowning fly. But in
noticing the fly’s struggle, relating to it, documenting it, he has given
its life and death new purpose.
Throughout its entirety, Green Squall, meanders laboriously
through a garden of melancholy, of tragic beauty, of sodden oppression. It
stops to watch the bees. It stops to see the leaves pool at the bases of trunks
and stalks; to watch shadows lengthen across the lawn. It sits awhile and
ponders the different intensities of light given off by daisies and stars. It
wonders about the tragic nature of freedom. And in the end the consistent
voice—haunted and painfully aware—realizes it is buried in the
garden from which it bloomed.
This book is a must for anyone who
wants to rescue nature from the stagnant pool of cliché. It digs and
digs until it reaches the roots of each thought, each association, each pain,
each beauty. It is a simultaneous uncovering of a deeper life and the digging
of a grave.