“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot once wrote, and for the last ten years, since its inception in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, has also been National Poetry Month. As part of this month-long national celebration of poetry, and in order to mitigate April’s cruelty, Yale Press is pleased to present Jay Hopler’s Green Squall, winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

“[T]here is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens,” Louise Glück observes in the book’s foreword.

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.

Read a poem (in pdf format) from the book.